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."