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. Her paintings are blends of portraiture and landscape, creating scenes that suggest mythological or symbolic narratives, influenced by a range of sources, including medieval icons, 17th century Dutch portraiture and paintings from the Elisabethan period.

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."