Born in Kirkcaldy in 1930 Frances Walker studied at Edinburgh College of Art and then took up a post as visiting teacher of art for the Hebrides . This experience engendered in her a life-long love of wild and desolate places and since then she has chosen to depict the most remote landscapes, her compositions usually based on coastal reaches, craggy rocks and deserted beaches. Moving to Aberdeen , Walker took up a post at Gray's School of Art where she taught for many years. After retirement she has since divided her time between Aberdeen and the Western Isles, especially Tiree, where she owns a thatched cottage, but more recently has also travelled further afield - her latest inspiration being the even wilder and more desolate landscape of Iceland .

In Iceland Walker was particularly impressed by the isolation and virtual lack of vegetation or animal life; the "silent, sterile naebody about feel to it". Unlike much of Walker's art, her recent paintings, such as Glacial Lagoon, give no indi­cation - however subliminal - of human life, past or present, yet the scene itself has an anthropo­morphic quality that creeps into a lot of Walker's work. In spite of the icy palette, there is a warmth to the russet-pink shingle, redolent of freckled skin. The glacier seems to rise from the lagoon, as majestic as Melville's famed white whale.

The smaller works in this display are all Scottish subjects of the most remote and ethereal places; in Sutherland Landscape she captures the brooding melancholy of the Flow Country, conveyed through subdued tonality and firm line. Her landscapes are unpeopled and seem remote but in the Scottish works the imprint of man or the memory of a long-since departed population is often visible - as when we see the boulders on a storm beach built up by the islanders to form a fank in Bororay. Walker does not view these places as desolate or sad, but instead finds pleasure in isolation. This theme has run through her work for decades. 

Work is also held in Private Collections in UK, Europe, Canada, USA and Australia, as well as HM Queen and HRH The Duke of Edinburgh.