Falling Petals
Solo Collection of new paintings by Elaine Speirs
Opening Saturday 7 February 2026, 3pm
 

Falling Petals marks a new artistic chapter for Scottish painter Elaine Speirs, an artist of rare depth and sustained accomplishment. Speirs trained at Edinburgh College of Art before completing her Master of Arts at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, institutions whose rigour and legacy are reflected in her thoughtful command of paint and form. Over the course of her career she has been a regular exhibitor at the Royal Scottish Academy, the SSA and the Mall Galleries in London, and has received numerous awards and competitive distinctions — including the Glasgow Art Club Award, the Caron Keating Memorial Award, and selection for the BP Portrait Award — affirming her standing within the contemporary British painting sphere.
 

In Falling Petals, Speirs’ recent floral works extend her longstanding engagement with the fragile, the ephemeral, and the evocative. These are paintings in which roses, blossoms, and drifting petals become more than botanical subjects: they are conduits for feeling, memory, and the transience of beauty. Across these canvases, pigment is coaxed, scrubbed, and layered with intuitive precision, creating surfaces that shimmer between the figurative and the abstract. Colour moves like breath — lush pinks and tender whites against deep, receding greens and murky skies — allowing each bloom to surface as both presence and trace.
 

Here, the flower cannot be read at a glance; it emerges over time, as impression and echo, as moment and residue. Through Speirs’ practiced hand, these petals do not merely fall — they unfold in paint with an urgency that is at once delicate and profound. The effect is visual poetry: an invitation to slow looking, to inhabit the liminal space between arrival and departure, presence and loss.
 

Falling Petals invites viewers to experience these works not as static still lifes but as resonant gestures — reflections on impermanence, beauty, and the quiet intensity of observation. The exhibition opens at the gallery on Saturday 7 February 2026 at 3pm.