Summer Fields

Yellow fields spill down toward the water in thick slabs of paint, each one laid down with a palette knife rather than a brush. That tool leaves its mark everywhere here: the clouds are built from broad scrapes of white and grey, the hedgerows are short jabs of dark green and violet, and a handful of tiny farm buildings are little more than single flicks of white. Step back and the whole thing reads as a summer afternoon over patchwork farmland; move closer and it dissolves into ridges and edges of pigment sitting proud of the surface.

Peter King is a contemporary Scottish painter who works this way across most of his landscapes, favouring the wide farmland and estuary views of eastern Scotland. The colour choices are more decision than description. Real fields are rarely orange or lime green, but by pushing them there he makes the ripening barley and pasture separate cleanly from one another, and the blue of the water below and the sky above holds it all together. The faint blue mountain on the horizon is the one point in the picture where the paint thins out and goes quiet, which is what gives the middle distance its sense of stretching for miles.