A conversation in time with Alison Watt ahead of new exhibition

Whilst at the GSA she excelled in portraiture. A self-portrait painted in 1986-87, in which she appears, impassive and androgynous, with her hand placed calmly, yet firmly, on her forehead, was an early signifier of both her technical excellence and her painterly imagination.

In the decades that have followed, Watt has become particularly identified with representations of the female nude and an extraordinary series of paintings of drapery and, occasionally, paper.

The nudes exude honesty, intimacy and empathy. However, unlike representations of the naked human body by artists such as Lucian Freud and Jenny Saville, Watt’s paintings do not focus primarily on the organically imperfect and ­inevitably degenerative nature of the flesh.

Instead, the emphasis is upon the ­complementary relationship of, typically pale and smooth, bodies with the drapery and furnishings around them. Watt has acknowledged the influence upon this aspect of her oeuvre of the 19th-century French painter Ingres.

However, whilst many of her nudes in the 1990s shared with Ingres an ­idealised depiction of the female nude alongside sumptuous drapery, not all of her paintings of the naked body can be so categorised.

Her 1994 painting Pears, for instance, places a young woman awkwardly on a futon, which, in turn, has been set upon bare, rough, paint-spattered floorboards.

The pears of the painting’s title are ­arranged, with almost Biblical ­symbolism, so as to cover the woman’s genitals. Nevertheless, there is also, in this work, a fascination with both the ­effect of the human body upon the ­drapery on which the figure sits and the extraordinary colour palette than can be achieved by painting in white.

It is, perhaps, her work in white – which, as any painter will tell you, is a rich and versatile colour, rather than a mere “shade” – that has come most to the fore in the public perception of Watt’s work. As Mélanie Hamet comments: “[Watt’s] colour of choice is white, which she blends with ochre, sienna, vermilion, grey, and black pigments to produce realistically modelled draperies of an almost sculptural nature.”

Hamet continues, perceptively: “The materials she depicts are heavy or ­lightweight, crumpled, knotted, or ­suspended, with sensual folds ­sometimes reminiscent of anatomical details, such as women’s genitalia inspired by Gustave Courbet’s Origin of the World (1866). She exploits the suggestive power of ­drapery, producing chaste evocations of the ­presence or absence of a body: the empty sheets on a bed, the pleats of a dress, the loincloth of Christ.”

This is not a case, on Hamet’s part, of an overactive critical imagination. She is not seeing in Watt’s paintings things that are not there.

It is, surely, impossible to look at Watt’s 2003 painting Hood, for ­example, without at least acknowledging the ­plausibility of a feminine, anatomical reading.

The picture depicts a white drape in which a, seemingly arbitrary, but no doubt carefully arranged, fold suggests the vulva in terms that are both poetic, yet unmistakable.

The painter’s interest in drapery, ­paper, furnishings and the like has ­created a ­distinctive strand in her work which, while remaining assiduously ­representational (rather than abstract, in the modernist sense), sits apart from ­figurative painting of the human ­subject. It is an aspect of Watt’s output that ­almost points towards the enigmatic ­title of her forthcoming exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh.

GOING under the title A Portrait ­Without Likeness, the show is the culmination of Watt’s long–standing interest in the work of the 18th-century Scottish portrait painter Allan Ramsay. In particular, Watt has responded, in the 16 new paintings in the exhibition, to Ramsay’s portraits of his first and second wives, Anne Bayne and Margaret Lindsay of Evelick. Both of Ramsay’s paintings are held in the collection of the Gallery, and they will be exhibited alongside Watt’s new series of pictures.

There are, in Watt’s latest works (which will be exhibited in Inverness ­following the Edinburgh show), some notable ­similarities with past paintings. In ­responding to details in Ramsay’s ­pictures and sketches, Watt alights on some of her established interests. A lace handkerchief, for example, ­facilitates a further exploration, not only of the ­possibilities of white, but also of the contours of fabric and the visual (and, therefore, emotional and psychological) impressions created by folds.

However, as Julie Lawson, chief curator of portraiture for the National Galleries of Scotland, writes in the splendid ­catalogue for the exhibition, the new paintings also “point to a significant new direction in [Watt’s] evolving oeuvre”.

For example, the painting Centifolia, which has been chosen as the promotional calling card for the exhibition, combines the subtle whiteness of the ­drapery pictures with the organic beauty of Watt’s past engagement with floral subjects.

Allan Ramsay’s portrait of Margaret Lindsay, with the fading rose in the subject’s left hand

In the picture, Watt isolates a pink Centifolia (or “old rose”), from Ramsay’s portrait of Margaret Lindsay. Placed on a light cream background, drooping as it does in Lindsay’s hand in Ramsay’s painting, the flower conveys both the delicacy and robustness of the rose.

MORE than that, however, in the context of the exhibition, in which very diverse sub-jects share rich, stylistic similarities, the painting promises to speak volubly to both the evolution of Watt’s art and the depth of her response to Ramsay’s work.

In Watt’s own words: “Looking at painting is one of the most important parts of being a painter, and I can’t deny the lure of the past… “Looking into an artist’s archive is to view the struggle that takes place to make a work of art. A painting is a visual ­record of the inside of the artist’s mind.

“It is something that takes place over time: it’s not static. To look at a work of art is to engage with an idea, and that’s not a one-sided activity. It’s more of a conversation.”

A Portrait Without Likeness is at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, July 17 to January 9, 2022