Graeme Todd makes landscapes, hidden and subverted under multiple layers of varnish. The paintings resemble a magical transparent pool, offering up subtle images that float toward the eye, carried forward by the separate varnished surfaces.

Distance through space and time is conveyed through the careful layering and in the choice of images Todd uses. These images can be obvious or mysterious, or sometimes almost quixotic, even psychedelic -- queer shapes plonked randomly on the top surface, not unlike magnifications of bacteria or amoebae, with great thin slashes of brightly painted yellow rain or round blobs of white snow.

All, however, are informed by the places Todd has been or imagined into existence, and from his frequent wanderings through the secondhand bookshops of Edinburgh, where he lives and works as a lecturer at an art college. For example, one painting -- "Mount Hiddenabyss" -- was inspired by an extract from the third century B.C. Chinese book "The Classic of Mountains and Seas."

It describes a hidden mystical place where "There is an animal . . . in appearance it has a horse's body with bird wings; it has a human face and a serpent's tail." This poem and painting, which open the catalog, initiate the viewer into Todd's own search for an interior or exterior sense of place.

This search is emphasized by the poem that weaves in and out of the pages facing the paintings in the catalog, a dialogue between a father and daughter who are fleeing their country. Titled "Crossing the Mountain," the poem is by fellow Scotsman Robert Alan Jamieson, who dedicates it to the work of the Scottish Refugee Council. It is a simple conversation, the father explaining to the child he is carrying why they are fleeing and how they will be joining their mother at the border, where they will all be safe and together again.

The titles Todd gives to the paintings also serve to emphasize his concern with place: "Mount Greatsunnygod"; "Crossing a Mountain"; "A Diligent Daily Run"; "Rest on the Ground"; "A Charming Walk"; "Live Where You Wish"; "Accommodation Equal to Any" and so on. Whimsical as you can get, they evoke all kinds of places or times. All moments are rendered as tangible as any landscape, reinterpreted by the artist's eye and hand into a palimpsest of surfaces.