Autumn Reflections

Thick slabs of paint do all the work here. The reds in the foreground were pushed on with a palette knife and left more or less as they landed, so you can see the ridges where the blade lifted away and the streaks of dark green showing through underneath. Nothing is drawn or outlined. A bush is a bush because of where the red stops and the teal begins, and the yellow ochre shapes in the middle could be autumn scrub or bare earth depending on how you read them.

Peter King works in a contemporary palette knife style that owes something to the expressive landscape painters of the last century, where mood and colour matter more than accurate detail. The horizon is the giveaway: a single long band of gold with a thin blue smudge of distant hills above it, painted in maybe three strokes. Above that, the sky is scraped almost flat, cool and pale, with one small light spot near the top that reads as a hazy sun.

The title mentions reflections, though there is no visible water. What is being reflected is the light itself, bouncing off the field and back into those burning reds below. It is a straightforward painting about colour temperature, hot against cold, and it does that job well without asking for much else.