Stephanie Dees was born in Northumberland and raised in North Berwick before undertaking her formal training at Edinburgh College of Art, where she graduated with a BA (Hons) in Drawing and Painting and later an MFA in Painting. She has exhibited regularly with The Scottish Gallery since 1997.
Dees’ work explores the transformative effects of light, atmosphere and season across both urban and rural landscapes. Working fluidly across mixed media, acrylic, watercolour, pencil, oil bar and oil pastel, she builds her compositions through quick, expressive marks that capture the shifting rhythms and geometry of Edinburgh’s New Town architecture. Her paintings balance structure with spontaneity, translating fleeting changes in weather and light into vibrant surfaces alive with movement.
Alongside her city scenes, Dees frequently turns to the coastline and countryside of East Lothian and the harbour towns of the East Neuk. Here, her use of watercolour often becomes more luminous and pared back, allowing her to evoke the translucency of a pale winter sky or the reflective stillness of a summer evening by the sea. Across her practice, place is experienced not as a fixed view, but as something felt through memory, atmosphere and passing light.
