Summer Fields 2, Arran

That jagged blue peak on the horizon is the giveaway: this is Arran, the island off Scotland's west coast whose mountains rise so abruptly from the sea that sailors use them as a landmark. Peter King has pushed everything else into blocks of pure colour, so the fields become slabs of lemon and acid yellow, the trees turn tangerine and scarlet, and the water at the bottom holds a broken reflection of it all. Look at the small white farm buildings tucked along the ridge, painted with a single flick of the knife each. They give the whole scene its sense of scale, and without them the yellow would just be yellow.

King works with a palette knife rather than a brush, which is why the paint sits up off the surface in ridges you could almost read with your fingertips. It is a technique with deep roots in Scottish painting, running back through the Scottish Colourists of the early twentieth century, who also liked bold, unapologetic hues over careful detail. The colours here are not strictly true to life. Arran in summer is greener and rainier than this. But the exaggeration gets at something honest about how a bright day feels on the island, when the light hits the crops and the whole hillside seems to glow harder than it should.