The rapidly increasing popularity of Hyslop's work was manifest in a recent sell-out exhibition at The Leith Gallery in Edinburgh and is due , in no small measure, to the bond the images create with the viewer. There is something of all of us in them and whether we see the subjects as funny or sad they still touch a chord. Hyslop herself does not see her pictures as funny because she does not often intend them to be that way. "I think they are more ironic", she says. Whether sad, funny or ironic, they are certainly unusual. Her ideas come from everywhere and are completely formulated in her mind before she paints. "A lot of artists' work seems to develop as they work on a picture. I don't. Mine is completely in my mind and it's actually a matter of getting it out."

Hyslop has painted semi-professionally since she settled in Edinburgh after graduating from Portsmouth School of Art in 1981 and has been painting full-time since 1995. From a creative family of mixed Scottish and Finnish parenthood Hyslop has drawn on family folk-lore and childhood memories of visits to relatives in the forests of south east Finland to developed her own unique style of communication. The Finnish strength of character and silent fortitude come across in her paintings, as does the stillness of the seasons in that northern woodland country. "I'm drawn to the melancholy, the darker side," she says. "Sometimes pictures, like music, express things that cannot be expressed in words". The end product of her artistic expression depicts characters set in a dreamlike limbo somewhere between reality and imagination-a timeless, never ending play of great depth and warmth.