Five young artists to keep your eye on in Scotland

Ruby Mitcham

Edinburgh-born Mitcham was just 17 and still at school when her portrait, A Scottish Lass, was chosen for display at last year’s Society of Scottish Artists (SSA) exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) in Edinburgh. Over the years the SSA has exhibited work by art world luminaries such as Auguste Rodin, Pablo Picasso, Edvard Munch and Paul Klee, and while Mitcham’s career hasn’t scaled those heights (yet) she did become the youngest artist ever to feature. The painting chosen for the exhibition showed her best friend Iona, a fellow pupil at fee-paying Gordonstoun School in Moray, where Mitcham was studying on an art scholarship. Hers was just one of 200 works picked from 2000 submissions for the 126th annual exhibition, which as well as painting features sculpture, installation, video and performance. Mitcham also found herself on the shortlist for the 2024 Scottish Portrait Awards and, fitting her description as “a rising art star”, last week featured in the new series of Sky Arts’ Stephen Mangan-fronted Portrait Artist Of The Year show. Not that she’s blasé about any of it. “I felt lost for words when I found out one of my paintings would be in the RSA,” she told Scottish Field magazine. “I walk by it regularly and now I have to pinch myself and remind myself that my art was on display there. It’s a lot to take in.”

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Aoife Cawley

Currently working between Ireland and Scotland, the County Kildare-born artist trained at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in Dundee, graduating with a First in Contemporary Art Practice. Focussing primarily on screen-printing, textile design and illustration, her breezily colourful work takes its inspiration from Celtic folklore and mythology but always shot through with an irreverent sense of humour. Imagine the Bayeux Tapestry re-imagined by the animation team behind cult children’s TV show Adventure Time. Cawley’s work could be seen most recently in May when it featured in the Royal Scottish Academy’s 199th Annual Exhibition, one of the country’s most prestigious showcases for Scottish and Scotland-based artists.

Aiofe Cawley(Image: Agency)

Elliot Killick

Killick graduated from Dundee’s Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (DJCAD) in 2018 and featured in that year’s Best Of Scottish Art Schools Grad Show organised by Glasgow-based gallery Artpistol. In 2020, he completed a Master of Fine Arts post-graduate degree at DJCAD, and he still lives and works in Dundee. Working mostly in oil, his paintings have a ghostly quality befitting their themes of memory, nostalgia and longing, and the flip-side of memory, forgetting. His 2018 collection Memento used the format of the Polaroid snap as the basis for a collection of startling and impressionistic portraits, while a 2021 set titled The Absurd riffed on the writings of Albert Camus and used as its basis vintage and ‘found’ photographs of people diving, jumping – or falling. Enigmatic and just a little bit un-nerving.

Megan Josephine

Winner of a prestigious Society of Scottish Artist’s New Graduate Award in 2024, the Glasgow School Of Art-trained painter only began her artistic journey in earnest aged 15 when post-viral chronic fatigue syndrome required extensive bed rest. During this enforced withdrawal from the world she taught herself to paint. Her huge, bold figurative paintings are underpinned by strong thematic elements to do with gender, women’s rights and the representation of women in art, and the SSA show at the Royal Scottish Academy featured her impressive work Touch II. Noting echoes of Paul Gauguin, Artmag described it as “a stunning, surreal, sensual study of six women, naked or scantily-clad, expressing a nonchalant sense of freedom, the scene bathed in an ethereal, golden glow.” In 2024 Josephine was also shortlisted for the £10,000 Hari Art Prize for her painting Blue Afternoon.

The Birthday Curse 5 by Rachel Glen(Image: Rachel Glen)

Rachel Glen

Chosen for the Royal Scottish Academy’s 2024 New Contemporaries exhibition, a prestigious showcase of 104 graduates selected from the 2022 and 2023 art school degree shows, the Edinburgh-based painter exhibited 10 paintings and 15 drawings from her 25-strong suite The Birthday Curse. Unsurprisingly given the title, the Edinburgh College of Art graduate is inspired by childhood events and memorable objects but filtered through her artistic sensibility, the distorting lens of time – and a strong sense of birthdays not always being happy family events. Describing the Birthday Curse series on her Instagram page she says: “After the age of 10 I can only remember all the negative emotions from my birthdays.” As a result, she adds, she has a “complicated relationship” with the inevitable annual event. Glen’s paintings are rendered mostly in acrylic on canvas, and she also works across drawing, sculpture and textiles.