Charles Simpson: New Paintings of the West Coast of Scotland

About

Simpson has painted professionally for many years and is now considered one of the most important landscape painters working in Scotland today.  As a landscape painter, the rough hill farm countryside immediately around his small cottage provides a regular supply of material, particularly when snow covers the winter landscape: “All my life I have loved the north-west coast of Scotland and so it is no surprise that that is what I paint.”

Every year trips are taken to north-west coast and islands of Scotland — with particularly favourite locations being Iona & Mull, Durness, Achiltibuie, Wester Ross, Arisaig and more recently the Uists. The combination of stunning beaches, changing seas, distant islands and mountains, and large dramatic skies provides unique subject matter.  These breathtaking inspirations can be seen collectively in Simpson’s impressive coastal panorama paintings such as ‘Figures on the Dunes’.

Common to all paintings is Simpson’s distinctive style of thickly applied oil paint, executed in robust broad strokes, that has clear precedents with the Glasgow School of the early twentieth century.  These post impressionist roots are tempered by Simpson’s instinctive sense of light and colour that imbues all of his paintings with a contemporary freshness and luminosity, visible in works such as the beautiful ‘South, Iona Abbey’.

Born in 1952, Simpson studied at Glasgow School of Art in the early 1970s.  After working as a graphic designer in Edinburgh he then became a full-time artist and moved to the Scottish Borders in the early 1990s to develop his painting.  He became a full-time painter in 1999 and has held regular solo Exhibitions in Scotland and London. His paintings can be found in corporate and private collections throughout the UK, Europe, North America and Hong Kong.