Beth Robertson Fiddes

Immersing herself in the wild beauty of Scotland’s west coast has added drama to this award-winning painter’s element landscapes. She tells JENNY WHITE how she creates her large-scale works

- Jenny White

From the crash and spray of the ocean to the glassy calm of a rock pool, Beth Robertson Fiddes is a masterful painter of water, her expansive paintings vividly evoking its freeform movement and the play of light through its depths.

Built up in mixed media layers, these works spring from hours spent walking and sketching on Scotland’s wild west coast, but the final pieces are completed in her studio. This is not the romantically windswept cabin you might expect, but rather a large industrial unit at the rear of a Chinese restaurant in Ullapool.

The artist needs the space. Her paintings are usually five or six feet wide; their scale is a key ingredient in the way she communicates her experience of the outdoors. “It’s about getting across an idea of scale and a sense of solitude and your place in the world,” she explains.

These are preoccupations that go back to childhood. Beth grew up on the Scottish island of Tiree; the first house she lived in was right on the shore and some of her earliest memories are of sitting on the harbour wall or playing in rock pools. “Water has always been a fascination,” she says. “When I lived inland it was things like waterfalls that fascinated me – the way the light changes as it passes through them. My place to be is by the water, and there is water in almost all the work I do.”

Beth’s parents, both artists, loved taking their children to art galleries. She particularly remembers a trip to see an exhibition of JMW Turner’s work: “I remember how vibrant the colours were. I recognised they were emphasised, but you really do get that kind of vibrancy in the landscape, the sea and the sky. I wouldn’t say I try to emulate him, but I do remember him having an impact.”