Green Sea Ardnamurchan

Thick ridges of white paint make up the sand here, pushed on with a palette knife and left with all the drag marks showing. That is Sanna Bay country, out on the Ardnamurchan peninsula, the westernmost tip of mainland Britain, where the beaches really are this pale and the water really does turn that improbable green when the sun hits it. Peter King has picked the exact moment when a band of turquoise sits between the dark blue swell offshore and the bleached dunes in front, with a smear of yellow marram grass along the crest.

King works in the tradition of the Scottish colourists, who learned from French painting that a landscape could be built out of bold slabs of colour rather than careful detail. Almost nothing in this picture is drawn. The distant hills are a single loaded stroke of deep blue, the clouds are blocks of white and grey laid side by side, and a few flicks of purple and pale blue in the foreground stand in for shadows on the sand. Stand back and it reads as a bright, windy day on the Atlantic coast; come close and it dissolves into ribbons of butter thick oil paint, with the ridges catching the light exactly as the real sand would.