All life is here in this year’s Scottish Portrait Awards, first launched by the Scottish Arts Trust in 2017. Thirty fine-art works and 50 photography pieces are divided across two rooms, every face in the show telling a story, whether looking directly out from the frame or else turned away, a reluctant subject. 

The familiarity of public figures in some images is an obvious appeal. Studies of Michael Rosen in Daniel Fooks’ painting and novelist James Kelman in Chris Close’s photograph are both broodingly chiselled and well-deserved winners in their respective categories. More playful is Mark Mulholland’s ‘The Strange Case Of Billy’s Banjo’, a painting of the late John Byrne in his studio, while Matt Brown’s photo of Young Fathers shows a band who understand fully the value of image.

Beyond the famous faces, more intriguing everyday narratives come through many of the works on show. There is the monumental torpor of Frederik du Plessis’ ‘Anhedonia’, the eyes-closed avoidance of ‘That Time’ by David Herd, and the well-practiced calm of Graeme Wilcox’s award-winning ‘D In Stripes’. Margaret Ferguson’s ‘Release’ is a moving photographic study of her dying father. The outdoor swimmer in repose in Jennifer Charlton’s ‘A Hidden Community’ looks curious, Lucy Gordon looks bird-like in her self-portrait ‘The Perch’, and a windswept serenity pervades the woman at one with nature in David Gillanders’ ‘Hebridean Breeze’.

This year’s awards look to the future as the Scotland Now! Phone Portrait Awards are being introduced. The initiative features more than 50 shortlisted artists working in this quickfire form and shown digitally, as befits their source. While each work is disparate in approach and concerns, the entire exhibition makes up a collective portrait of a society asked to pause a moment. Together, they comprise a rich tapestry of a world at large. 

Scottish Portrait Awards 2024, Duff House, Banff, until Friday 31 January; reviewed at Scottish Arts Club, Edinburgh; main picture: A Hidden Community / Picture: Jennifer Charlton.