Summer Light Goatfell

Slabs of paint do the work here. Peter King builds this mountain almost entirely with a palette knife, pressing flat blocks of blue, white and cream onto the canvas and leaving the ridges and edges where they fell. The peak of Goatfell, the highest point on the Isle of Arran off Scotland's west coast, rises just left of centre in a deeper blue, with the cloud bank above it made of dozens of pale rectangles stacked like tiles. Down on the lower slopes, sudden strokes of orange and yellow break the cool scheme. Whether they read as sunlit bracken, gorse or simply the artist's own decision, they are the thing your eye keeps returning to.

The approach sits somewhere between landscape and abstraction, in the tradition of contemporary Scottish painters who treat scenery as a set of shapes and colour temperatures rather than a view to copy. Squint and the hill is unmistakable; move closer and it dissolves into geometry and thick paint. The name Goatfell probably comes from Norse settlers, something close to goat mountain, though some prefer a Gaelic root meaning windy hill. Either way, the mountain has been drawing walkers and painters to Arran for a very long time, and King's version trades detail for the sensation of glare and haze on a warm day.