Francis West's Voyages brings mythology of Scottish coasts to London in Piper Gallery show

Exhibition Preview: Francis West – Voyages, The Piper Gallery, London, until October 5 2012

The Piper Gallery is dedicated to contemporary artists with a career spanning more than 40 years. It’s been 76 since Francis West was born in a remote fishing community in Scotland, where he grew up before heading for National Service and a spell at the Chelsea School of Art.

Those formative years on the Moray Firth, where he would often work on his father’s fishing boats, have done much to influence his mythology-tinged works: West’s Tempestas, begun in 1987, sees a turbulent wind swirling through the caves ahead of a waiting ship, part of West’s Palimpsests series of large-scale drawings in which he over-worked several of his earlier expressionist pieces to create a more disrupted feel.

West has sought risks during his career, creating works channelling the adrenalin of fishing atop a rough sea, or heading to America, during two working trips after he moved to Paris during the 1990s, for a set he calls the “bandit series”.

Figurative forms abound in his drawings, pastels and paintings - often in states of metamorphosis - and imagined realms of forests and caverns, populated by “grotesque” flora and fauna, flow around hybrid human-animals in a style which has drawn comparisons to Goya and Bacon.

“It’s exciting to be able to present a lesser-known artist whose recent work is energetic and fresh,” says Megan Piper, the Founder and Director of the gallery holding its first solo show since it opened in June.

“It gives us the opportunity to explore voyages – a theme pertinent to the ethos of the gallery. Francis’ maturity and experience means that he is able to explore the theme in a way a young artist would never be able to.”

• The Piper Gallery, Newman Street, London. Open Tuesday-Saturday 10am-6pm. Admission free. Follow the gallery on Twitter.

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