Fuji Sunset Glow — Print & Oil Painting

The sun is the largest shape on the canvas, bigger than the mountain, painted as a flat yellow wheel with an orange spiral at its heart. It hangs high and a little left of centre with the peak placed directly beneath it, so the two shapes stack rather than compete.

Scale is handled by subtraction. The mountain is reduced to a pale triangle behind a bank of cloud, the far hills are single dark strokes, and the water is one long horizontal of gold shading to deep blue on the right. A rowing boat with a standing figure amounts to a few marks of paint; two birds skimming the surface are three marks each.

The right third belongs to a tree with yellow leaves and a dark twisting trunk, painted in far heavier impasto than anything behind it. Beneath it a pale stone path runs down to the bottom corner with a small walker in a red top on it, back turned, the only figure given any real colour.

The palette is deliberately short: gold, cobalt, and the black-green of the banks. From our Japan collection, where the spring canvas takes the same lake under a completely different sun.