Rising Moon

A pale band of pink runs along the horizon where the sun has just gone, and above it the sky fades into washes of cream, grey and blue. The hills sit in layers, each one lighter than the last, until the furthest ridge nearly dissolves into the haze. Down in the water, a single pale streak of reflected light runs toward the viewer, the sort of thing you only see when the surface is almost perfectly still. Reeds and dry grasses edge the shoreline in muted gold, and the bare trees along both banks are painted so loosely they read more as smudges of colour than as branches.

Carina Prigmore is a contemporary British painter who works mainly in oils and builds her landscapes in thin, blended layers, which is why the edges here look breathed on rather than drawn. Her approach owes a lot to the Tonalist painters of the late nineteenth century, artists who cared less about recording a specific place and more about capturing a particular quality of light at a particular hour. The title points to a moon that has barely arrived, and that is more or less how the whole picture works: everything is in the middle of changing, with the day not quite finished and the night not quite begun.