Abigail McLellan

Abigail McLellan belongs to the rich tradition of Scottish figurative painting. She studied at the Glasgow School of Art, developing an extraordinarily sure sense of both colour and design. Influenced by the colourist inheritance of Scottish art from Peploe to Craigie Aitchison and by the taut economy of the Japanese aesthetic (mediated perhaps through the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh), she evolved her own very personal artistic language.

McLellan's luminously-coloured pared-down paintings of flowers, corals and interiors have the strength and simplicity of icons. Her idiosyncratic portrait work was also highly acclaimed, being exhibited at both the National Portrait Gallery in London, and the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh. She extended her practise into both sculpture and printmaking.

McLellan died in 2009 after a long battle against multiple sclerosis. She kept working until the last months of her life. A book about her work - Abigail McLellan by Matthew Sturgis - was published by Lund Humphries in 2012. Several examples of her work are held by the Fleming Collection of Scottish Art, London.