Facing the Nation

About the Book: 

‘In all of his portraiture, Moffat aims to find a balance between emotional expression and compositional order. Over the last 50 years or so, almost single-handed, he has upheld the importance of modern portraiture in Scotland. A determined champion and outstanding practitioner of modern portrait painting, he has produced a body of work not only of high artistic quality, but also of national and historical importance.’ BILL HARE

‘“I am a poet but I’m attracted to clarity, to clear, sparse detail.” Muriel Spark was writing about her own prose style but she might equally have been describing the art of Alexander Moffat who was commissioned to paint her portrait in 1984…’ A Companion Guide to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery

‘Moffat’s portrait started from studies done in MacDiarmid’s home shortly before his death, but developed into something more complex: a likeness that is also an account of him as a thinker and worker.’ NORBERT LYNTON, Picturing People: British figurative art since 1945

Reviews: 

Illuminating, lavishly illustrated and long overdue retrospective of Moffat's work. ALAN TAYLOR

About the Author:

BILL HARE was born in Edinburgh in 1944 and studied at the University of Edinburgh and the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, in the 1970s. Since then he has taught art history at the University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh College of Art and the Open University. In 1985 he was appointed Exhibitions Organiser at the Talbot Rice Gallery working with many Scottish artists as well as those from wider afield.

Since 1995 he has concentrated on teaching and freelance curating, with his main focus on Scottish art since 1945. He has curated a number of important exhibitions both in Scotland and abroad, and has published books and catalogues on a range of different aspects of historical, modern and contemporary Scottish art. He is currently an Honorary Fellow in Scottish art history at the University of Edinburgh.

ALEXANDER (SANDY) MOFFAT RSA is an artist and teacher. Born in Dunfermline in 1943 he studied painting at Edinburgh College of Art. From 1968 to 1978 he was the Director of the New 57 Gallery in Edinburgh. In 1979 he joined the staff of The Glasgow School of Art where he was Head of Painting from 1992 until his retirement in 2005. His portraits of the major poets of the Scottish Renaissance movement now hang in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and his paintings are represented in many public and private collections including the Yale Center for British Art, USA and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.