Golden Light Breaking Over a Snow-Dusted Alpine Valley — Print & Oil Painting

This one is painted in flat blocks and never pretends otherwise. Each rock, each snow patch, each face of the mountains is laid down as a single opaque shape with a hard edge, almost nothing is blended, and the brush marks stay visible as separate strokes. It is closer to gouache poster work than to oil, and the simplification is what gives it its snap.

The colour scheme is two complements and no compromise. Every surface turned away from the sun is blue or violet, from the pale sky down through the shadowed snow to the near boulders; every surface catching it is hot orange, and those orange faces are confined to the upper slopes on both sides and one wall in the middle distance. Between the two there is no transitional colour at all.

The valley floor is arranged as a rhythm rather than a place. Dark rounded boulders are dropped across it at intervals of roughly equal size, patches of melting snow lie between them in irregular white shapes, and the grass shows through in flat green. Two or three conifers stand up as solid dark triangles, and a stream of thaw water threads the middle.

Light rays come down through the upper left in straight pale diagonals, drawn as bands rather than as glow. The whole picture is high-key, saturated and cheerful, and it is the sunniest canvas in a group of paintings that otherwise runs to grey.

A valley like this one, full of melting snow at the northern end of the map, is where a very long river starts. The sources of the Great River rise in these mountains, along with the stream that feeds the forest to the south, which means the meltwater in the foreground here has a considerable journey in front of it. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, beside the same range with the weather closing in and a moonlit path through hills further west.