Photos by Alix McIntosh Photography
Elaine Speirs is an award-winning Scottish/South African painter based in Edinburgh. She holds an MA from the Slade School of Art and BA (Hons) from Edinburgh College of Art. Speirs has been shortlisted for the Royal Academy Summer Show, National Open Art Competition, Threadneedle Prize, and W Gordon Smith Award. Speirs was selected for the BP Portrait Award in 2019 and has exhibited at the Portrait Gallery and Mall Galleries in London, and the Royal Scottish Academy, among other institutions. In 2021, she was elected as Professional Member for Visual Arts Scotland. Her works are held in private collections worldwide.
Speirs’s practice focuses on landscape and figurative painting in oil. She creates scenes that appear ethereal, feminine and elegant, yet underpinned by vibrancy and strength. Speirs’s paintings are steeped in the language of paint and sit somewhere between realism and abstraction. They live in a space shaped by memory and reality. It is not always comfortable, but it is honest. Speirs sees the canvas as an unbiased field where things come and go through a daily process of reducing and rebuilding. Her process is physical, and the accumulation of the brushstrokes feels at ease with the rhyme and movement of her touch. Sometimes something magical happens, but the dominant feeling is one of constant possibility.
