Ewan MacLeod

Seventy-year-old abstract landscape painter in a converted byre on the north coast of Sutherland, Scotland's emptiest county. He paints the peat bog — not the dramatic cliffs — in thick oil impasto applied with palette knives, sometimes his thumb. The paint surface can be a centimeter thick. He broke his right wrist in 2014; the changed grip made the paintings better. He names all his lurchers Bess. He is on his third. He has been painting the same ten square miles for thirty-two years and hasn't started looking.