Open studio art exhibition | 2025

Rachel Brooks

Rachel Brooks is an internationally acclaimed Wildlife Artist and Scientific Illustrator based in the Scottish Highland town of Oban. She specialises in marine wildlife, capturing high levels of intricate detail using ink.

Drawing from her extensive background in Zoology, Marine Biology, and the Scuba Industry, she has immersed herself in the field, spending years amidst her fascinating subjects.

Living in world renowned marine environments such as the Great Barrier Reef, Ningaloo Reef, the Lembeh Straits and the Coral Triangle. Rachel has gathered inspiration from across the globe which is reflected in the diversity of wildlife found within her work. 

Rachel now resides in the Scottish Highlands and has spent three years working in the Sea of the Hebrides Marine Protected Area with basking sharks. She is an advocate for celebrating the often overlooked marine life found in the UK, and for shark conservation. 

As a storyteller, art is her main media, but she is also a photographer, speaker and science communicator. 

Val Hamilton

Creativity comes to Val in many forms and she finds her ‘multi-media meditations’ provide a means of combining her skills, interests and inspiration.

Her jewellery and textile design training from Glasgow School of Art are integral to her collage work. Val often uses semi-precious beads and wire, woven or stitched with found objects to create a visual inspired by particular texts or memories.

Whether combing the shoreline in front of her home or exploring distant cultures, all become potential sources ready for blending into a new visual narrative.

Val is currently creating a body of work recording & responding to the renovation and history of the Rockfield Centre, Oban.

Sheila Quillin

Sheila’s sculptures bring out the hidden beauty of the wood, asking to be picked up, handled and held, each piece is a unique, inspired by the natural world.

“There is a contract between me and the wood, I picked it up because I saw something in it and want to explore it, because my eyes have witnessed the movement, my hands remember and know the turns.”

Unlike the classical sculptors, Sheila asks that her pieces are touched, picked up, taken for walks to become familiar with and owned.

“Every piece has its own story and every person who interacts with it will do so in a way unique to them.”

Walter Watson

Walter was born in Glasgow and spent his working life in the NHS in that city. On retiral, he moved to St Andrews and, together with his wife, Margaret, ran a charity tearoom and gallery there for many years supporting schools in Africa.

Now retired again, Margaret and Walter have relocated to Oban and Walter has returned to painting. He is inspired by the interplay of light as it falls on face, flower or field. Most of his work revolves around landscapes from Shetland to Italy.

All proceeds from Walter’s art sales go to children’s charities.

Ann McLachlan

Ann is a retired musculoskeletal physiotherapist who lives with her husband on a small croft outside Oban. Always a creative person, it was only on retiring from the NHS that she has been able to start exploring that part of herself more fully.

Having studied human anatomy in a previous degree, her specialist skills led naturally from life drawing with Helensburgh Art Club to oil painting evening classes (Portraiture and Rendering the Human Form in oils) and summer Open Studios at Glasgow School of Art.

Inspiration for her work comes where she can feel an emotional connection and mentally visualise her subject. This can be seen in the collection of work “Taynuilt Chickens”, based on her own croft chickens, which she has created for this Artmap 2025.

She continues to be student of the renowned portrait artist Denise Findlay PAI who is helping her to develop her artistic language. Ann has previously exhibited and sold work at the Helensburgh Art Club exhibition, the Appin Art Group exhibition (where she also organises artist workshops for the group) and through private commissions.