Winter Light Perthshire

That small pale dot near the top of the sky is the moon, already up while the sun is still setting. Below it, a band of pink stretches across the whole canvas, the kind of light that arrives in Perthshire in the middle of a winter afternoon and is gone within the hour. Peter King has laid the paint on thick with a palette knife, dragging it sideways so the ridges catch real light on the surface. Fields, hedgerows and distant hills are suggested rather than drawn: a smudge here becomes a farmhouse, a scrape of dark blue there becomes a line of trees. Look for the streak of mustard yellow running along the middle of the picture, the only warm note in a scene otherwise built from blues, and probably the last of the sun catching a strip of stubble or frozen water.

King is a Scottish painter who works mostly in oils and favours these wide, low horizons, pushing landscape close to abstraction without ever letting it tip over. Perthshire suits that approach. It sits where the Lowlands meet the Highlands, and on a cold clear day the hills flatten into layered bands of colour exactly as they do here. The bottom third of the painting, deep blue with a brighter turquoise below, could be water, could be shadowed field. He does not tell you, and the ambiguity is part of how the picture works. The signature sits at the lower right, scratched into wet paint with the tip of the knife.