Summer Fields, Arran

Thick ridges of paint do all the work here. Peter King builds his hills with a palette knife rather than a brush, laying yellow, lime green and deep blue in flat slabs that catch the light differently depending on where you stand. The clouds are pressed on in pale scoops of cream and lilac, and if you follow the edge of the sky where it meets the mountains, you can see the ridges of paint left standing where the knife lifted away. Down in the water, a long horizontal smear of grey blue does the job of a reflection with almost no detail at all.

The place is Arran, an island in the Firth of Clyde that Scots often call "Scotland in miniature" because it packs rugged northern peaks and softer southern farmland into one small landmass. That contrast is exactly what King has picked out: jagged blue hills along the top, then a rolling patchwork of summer fields, then a dark band of trees before the shore. King, a Scottish painter who works this way across much of the west coast, is less interested in accuracy than in the punch of colour, so fields become bright wedges of yellow and shadows turn navy. The small signature in the bottom right corner is easy to miss against all that blue.