Alison Watt There s a large Alison Watt painting called Phantom, which lurks quietly on a stairwell in Glasgow s Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery. It always takes me by surprise; like all good phantoms should. This work always appears to me to be entirely composed and ethereally beautiful. There s an otherness about it too; an intensely sensual quality which suggests the most intimate parts of a woman s body. Part of a series which combined Watt s investigation of the use of fabric in art, it is a personal response by Watt to Francisco de Zubarán s seventeenth century painting, Saint Francis in Meditation, which is in the collection of the National Gallery in London. Watt has said in the past that she considered Phantom to be the most resolved work of a series which she made while she was artist-in-residence at the National Gallery in 2007.