Winter Moon Tinto Hill

That small pink dot in the upper right is the winter moon, sitting in a pale sky above the snow-streaked bulk of Tinto Hill. Tinto rises above the Clyde valley in South Lanarkshire, Scotland, and it is one of the most recognisable landmarks in the Southern Uplands, topped by an enormous Bronze Age cairn. Its name is thought to come from a Gaelic word meaning fiery, most likely because beacon fires were once lit on its summit, though the reddish rock of the hill may have something to do with it too.

Peter King works almost entirely with a palette knife, dragging and scraping oil paint across the surface rather than brushing it on. You can see the evidence everywhere: the horizontal smears of the loch, the vertical drips where paint has been pulled downward through the treeline, and the thin lines scratched right back into the wet paint to suggest bare branches and reeds. Even the artist's initials in the lower right are scratched rather than signed. The palette is almost entirely blue, with just a few flecks of ochre along the far shore to mark dead winter grass, which keeps the whole thing from tipping into monotony. It is landscape reduced to its bones, more about weather and light than topographical accuracy, and closer in spirit to abstraction than to a postcard view.