Monteuil Bellay, Summer

A garden path curls uphill through banks of flowers, and the paint handles everything as flat, confident shapes: yellow daylilies cut like paper petals, spires of purple salvia, white umbels of cow parsley floating against the greenery. The path itself is the surprise. Rather than sandy beige, it is painted in deep blues and violets where leaves throw their shadows, so the walkway reads almost like water running down the slope. Jennifer Irvine, a Scottish painter who works mainly in gouache, builds her pictures this way, stacking bold blocks of colour rather than blending them, which gives the whole surface a woven, tapestry-like feel.

Montreuil-Bellay sits in the Loire Valley, a small fortified town known for its castle and its vineyards, and Irvine has returned repeatedly to French gardens and hillsides for subjects. Her approach owes something to the Post-Impressionists and to the Scottish Colourists before her, painters who trusted strong colour to carry a scene without fussy detail. Worth spotting: the pale stone wall on the right, where the same violet used in the shadows turns up again in the mortar lines, tying the built parts of the garden to the planted ones. It is a straightforward record of a summer afternoon, made interesting by how firmly the artist commits to her palette.