RED POINT
The Red Point series developed through repeated visits to a remote sheep and cattle farm near Gairloch in the North West Highlands of Scotland. Since 2020, I have spent time working alongside the family there, helping with livestock, gathering sheep and maintaining the farm while gradually building relationships with the people and landscape around it.
The work grew from this direct involvement. Rather than treating the Highlands as a distant or romantic landscape, I became interested in the physical realities of rural labour, the knowledge passed between generations, and the pressures facing small-scale farming and fishing communities.
The series brings together portraits, working interiors, animals and landscapes, treating them as parts of the same environment. Through painting and drawing, I am trying to record a place where people, work and landscape are inseparable. Where pre-industrial ways of life continue within a rapidly changing, post-industrial world. Rather than relying on inherited symbolism or the romanticised image of the shepherd, the paintings seek an honest depiction of rural life, acknowledging its beauty, endurance and difficulty while resisting idealisation.
EXPLORE THE WORK
Sheona Mackintosh
Here, I've painted the farmers who embody this place: a son and wife navigating the challenges of the present, and his father, who worked the land in a different time. The farm’s story is one of resilience amidst upheaval; the collapse of wild salmon populations due to industrial salmon farming and the precarious reliance on sheep farming. These stories, deeply personal yet universal, reflect the fragility of rural life and the enduring connection between people and land.
Willie Mackintosh
Donald Mackintosh
Clary
Since graduating, I have extended the work across the wider Gairloch area, painting people whose lives are inseparable from the environments they inhabit – figures who feel not simply placed into landscape, but formed by it.
Roxy
Stevie Morris
THE LANDSCAPE
The Scottish landscape sits at the core of my practice. It is what first brought me to art and remains the place I continually return to for inspiration. I am drawn to its scale, weather and sense of deep time — the feeling that the land has been forming over millions of years while human lives pass across it only briefly. That tension between geological time and human time continues to shape the way I think about landscape and our place within the natural world.
The history of Red Point runs quietly through the work. Old tools, buildings, stories and ways of working become traces of the generations that have shaped the land before the present one. I am interested in how these histories remain embedded in a place — not as nostalgia, but as something still active within contemporary rural life. Painting allows me to hold those different times together, recording both what endures and what is gradually disappearing.
NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY
‘QUEST FOR THE MACKINTOSH MAN’
Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer
Portrait Award 2025
"There's immense talent on display"
★★★★
The Times
