Scotland’s largest private art gallery, the Roger Billcliffe Gallery in Glasgow, is showing an exhibition by painter Sam Cartman. Sam is fascinated by the countryside of Dumfries and Galloway, particularly the raw moors and glens around Thornhill – Cample Woods and the Forest of Ae, which are largely free of human intervention, so their emptiness appeals to his instinct for the abstract qualities of place – ‘vistas he can catch with a spread of his knife across the canvas with small notes of colour in the texture of cliffs and pathways or dark streaks of a glowering sky.’ 

Image: ‘Ae Fields’, oil on board