Alison Dunlop RSW

Alison was born in Canada and began her studies there before continuing in France and Britain. She moved to Scotland in 1982 to undertake postgraduate studies at Edinburgh College of Art and has made Scotland her home. In 1989, Alison was elected a member of the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour and is a past Vice-President of the Society. She also served as President of Visual Arts Scotland for three years in the late 1990s and has been made an Honorary Life Member. Her work is widely held in both public and private collections throughout the UK and Canada.

Alison began working on her Inner Sound Series in her new studio in Wester Ross in 2009: "It's my attempt to find an equivalent in paint for the experience of looking out beyond my studio windows to the seas of the Inner Sound and the Minch. As the series has grown, the images have inevitably become more and more abstract, distilled, re-defined.

The energy and the light in this place is unlike any I've known before and living here is a daily immersion in a breathtaking (sometimes overpowering) drama played out by the elements. The process of pressing forward with this new imagery, not knowing what the next piece will bring or where it will take me, is very exciting - it has taken on an energy of its own.

Each piece seems to grow out of the previous ones, to teach the eye and the hand something new, often with an increasing sense of boldness and vigour.  To let the hand, the pigment, the paper and the water grapple - and then act in unison, giving form to my (inner) experience of the drama unfolding beyond my window."