THIS life

ROSEMARY BEATON - Colour bursts from the acclaimed artist’s canvases and fills her home and garden in Renfrewshire 

- Natasha Radmehr

It is the hottest day of the year, but even in an Arctic tundra I’d be warmed by the exuberant scene before me. Sunlight streams through the glass doors of the artist’s studio, skipping generously across her acid-bright landscape paintings. Canvases ripe with colour climb the walls and perch on easels; fuchsia-drenched hills and lush lime-green plants wink from every corner. On a table, wrinkled paint tubes congregate around rainbow-stained palettes. Amid the riot of colour sits Rosemary Beaton, a vision with a tangerine-lipstick smile.

Beaton, one of Scotland’s most important artists (though I suspect she’s too modest to admit it), has always known how to brighten a room. As a young student of the Glasgow School of Art in the 1980s, she was part of a second wave of female artists dubbed the ‘Glasgow Girls’ who enjoyed critical acclaim for their bold, expressive work. “We had the artists Steven Campbell, Adrian Wiszniewski and Ken Currie a few years above us, who painted big, bold canvases and set the path for women in my year to push forward on the art scene,” she remembers. “We were quieter, and perhaps a bit more poetic, but the energy we got from them was really inspiring.”