Helen Flockhart’s paintings often show a moment of stillness, with just one or two figures silhouetted in isolation against a finely wrought background. She tries to create a sense of portent, a feeling of time slowed down to a core of frozen energy, and never has she done this more tellingly - and ironically - than in this scene. It shows the famous eleventh-century Viking ruler of England, Canute, who also governed Denmark, most of the land around the Baltic and much of Norway. He never ruled Scotland but successfully checked Scottish incursions into Northumbria. According to popular legend, Canute’s courtiers sought to please him by saying that even the tides would obey his commands. A devout Christian, he sat by the water’s edge and ordered the incoming tide to retreat, to demonstrate to his subjects that only God is all-powerful. Flockhart says of her work: “I hope that my paintings create a stillness  - that they suggest a lull, a sense of portent, slowing a moment right down to its core of frozen energy.”

Helen Flockhart, born 1963

One of the most accomplished painters of her generation, Flockhart was born in Hamilton, Lanarkshire, and trained at Glasgow School of Art from 1980 to 1985. After graduating she spent a year studying painting at the State Higher School of Fine Art in Poznan, Poland. Flockhart has exhibited in numerous groups and solo exhibitions in her native Scotland as well as in London, Rotterdam and Poland. Her paintings have attracted a great deal of attention and she has won a number of awards and bursaries, including a British Scholarship, a Scottish Arts Council Bursary and, in 1996, a Purchase Prize from the Smith Art Gallery and Museum, Stirling.
In Scottish Art in the 20th Century Duncan Macmillan says that Flockhart paints "in a manner that recalls the painting of fifteenth-century Flanders but uses "the sharp focus of this technique to give a vivid expressive impact" to her imagery of contemporary life. Her work combines a consuming richness of detail and pattern with a dramatic directness. She says of it: "I hope that my paintings create a feeling of stillness - that they suggest a lull, a sense of portent, slowing a moment right down to its core of frozen energy."