Grassmarket, Edinburgh
Acrylic on paper
25 × 25 cm
This small square painting captures the Grassmarket not as a literal street, but as a layered theatre of Edinburgh’s history. The tall tenement forms lean and overlap like stage flats, their pale facades glowing against a dramatic rose-pink sky. Colour is used architecturally: blocks of ochre, chalky white and deep green stack and interlock, creating a sense of the city built over centuries of itself.
Rather than describing specific buildings, the work evokes the lived atmosphere of the place — its density, its human scale, and its slightly precarious verticality. Dark, rhythmic window marks flicker across the surfaces like musical notation. The brushwork is brisk and textured, allowing earlier colours to show through and reinforcing the idea of time embedded in the structure of the city.
The result is an image that feels both intimate and monumental: a familiar Edinburgh street translated into a richly coloured, emotional landscape.
