The Paps of Jura

Three quartzite peaks on the Isle of Jura, off Scotland's west coast, have been landmarks for sailors for centuries. Their name comes from the Gaelic for breasts, which is exactly what they look like from a distance: smooth, rounded humps rising from a low island. In Peter King's painting they have been reduced almost to nothing, a pale blue silhouette sitting just above a band of shoreline, seen across a stretch of water at the end of the day. The small white smudge near the top of the sky is the moon, already up while the last light is still going.

King works in oils with a palette knife, and the paint is laid on in flat slabs you can see the edges of. Bands of pink and pale green stack up in the sky, then a hard blue mass for the land, then that startling seam of orange where the sun catches the water and the low ground. The foreground water is left broad and simple, with a few dark blue drips running down the surface where the paint was too wet to behave. This is contemporary Scottish landscape painting pushed close to abstraction, more interested in the shapes light makes than in describing every rock and tree. Jura itself has fewer than 200 residents, a single road, and a famous distillery, and George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four in a farmhouse at its northern end.