Alison Gibbons Watt is a painter from the West of Scotland living in Rhode Island, USA.

Alison's works are bold abstracts on canvas that fuse drawing alongside planes of colour and texture to create dynamic and playful compositions. The painted elements are built in a sculptural fashion using a mix of surface treatments in contrast to one another. Sketched charcoal lines weave across the raw canvas creating a fragility in comparison to the clean smooth forms of solid ground. Each form supports the next which both alleviates and builds tension in tandem. The paintings depict an architecture of emotions that simultaneously unravel and keep order at once suggesting an internal landscape in transition. A bold and complex palette of pop colours is softened by the neutrality of the raw canvas and deep tonal shades of ink.

Exploring formal painting qualities, Alison captures shape, light, colour, and movement in stark contrasts explaining the complexity of human emotion with a sculptural sensibility on a two-dimensional plane.

artist statement
The interplay of emotions and their resulting consequences are the elements that fuel the inspiration for Alison's paintings. Snapshots taken from memory can be hazy, crystal clear, or somewhere in between where fiction begins. The paintings represent visual diaries where an event experienced becomes the ignition to each work. The compositions unfold as each mark meets one another creating new pathways and possible outcomes.

Taking references from personal life experiences along with stories from fiction and the media Alison builds a narrative in the form of paint using every event as an inspirational seed to each work. Drawing is central to Alison's work and each painting begins with a series of lines playfully moving around the space in correspondence to each other creating networks and chance encounters. Organically shaped forms build in patterned layers creating a collaged effect suggesting the fragmented nature of memory and how things can seem different when viewed from a distance.