Brodick Bay Arran

That thick yellow field in the foreground was not brushed on. Peter King works with a palette knife, spreading paint the way you might spread butter, and you can see the flat ridges and scrape marks left behind across the whole lower half of the picture. The sky got the same treatment, built from overlapping slabs of white and pale blue that catch the light differently depending on where you stand. It is a working method that forces an artist to simplify, because a knife cannot do fussy detail, and here that suits the subject perfectly.

The view looks across the water to the Isle of Arran, with the peaks around Goatfell rising in deep blue on the horizon. Arran sits in the Firth of Clyde and is often called "Scotland in miniature" because it packs highlands, lowlands, beaches and glens into one small island. Brodick is its main village, the spot where the ferry from Ardrossan arrives. King, a Scottish painter drawn again and again to the country's west coast, has cut the scene down to its bones: a band of dark blue sea, a strip of green with a few trees and rooftops, and then that overwhelming sweep of yellow farmland. The pinkish patch near the centre foreground is where he let a warmer colour break through, and it keeps the field from becoming a flat wall of gold.