Town Square

The paving stones do most of the work here. They march away from us in a wide grid of blue, grey and chalky white, each slab painted with a few loose swipes of the brush rather than carefully outlined, so the square reads as both a real place and a pattern of rectangles. That grid pulls your eye straight back toward the buildings and trees at the top of the picture, where a stretch of orange and cream façades catches the late sun. It is a simple trick of perspective, but it makes an ordinary plaza feel enormous.

The people are barely people at all. Most are a few vertical strokes with a smudge of colour for a shirt: a woman in coral, a man in a blue tee, a child in orange near the middle distance. Only the figure at the far left, cropped by the edge and much larger than the rest, comes close to us, and even he is more shadow than face. Ella Williams works in a contemporary painterly style that keeps the brushwork visible and unfussy, closer to a fast oil sketch than a finished portrait of a town. The result feels like the way you actually remember a public square after walking through it: the ground, the light, the heat, and a handful of strangers whose faces you never really saw.