This is a joyous celebration of Fionna Carlisle’s dynamic career, illustrating her signature style: lush landscapes evoking the spirit of time and place, figurative studies bursting with verve and vitality, and portraits reflecting a quiet emotional sensibility. A Grande Dame of the art world indeed.

The exhibition takes us on an inspirational journey through Fionna's career: born in Wick, she was brought up mainly in Edinburgh, returning to Caithness for summer holidays, and now lives in Scotland and Crete – her home for part of the year.

With a golden luminosity, Caithness Thistles – the spiky purple and green Flower of Scotland – evokes childhood walks with her mother and grandmother along the cliffs to the outdoor swimming pool, ‘The Trinkie’.

Edinburgh’s urban village of Stockbridge has gentrified over the years into a cultural Hampstead/Notting Hill hub of bars, restaurants, bookshops, art and design; Fionna's 'Stockbridge' is a memory of ‘Danube Street ladies’ and Tiffany’s nightclub, the scene haunted with the wild expression on the dancer’s face with exaggerated Lulu Guinness red lips.

Then from Edinburgh to Crete, Fionna's second home. To Loulouthi brings to life El Mondo’s bar in Xania, Crete, in which a couple tentatively eye-up each other, as a guy attempts to sell a bouquet – Loulouthi is the Greek word for flowers. You can almost feel the heat and hear the rhythmic beat of music in this jazzy painting.

‘Fionna Carlisle is a naturally gifted painter, her heroic determination has an Olympic dimension for she spends half the year on the island of Crete, where her art soaks up sunlight. She paints people, flowers and landscapes – all spring from the same source whether it’s the dark, sultry or the sumptuousness of sunflowers.’

– Julian Spalding, (Museum director, art critic and writer).

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