oil painting by Ray Patrick
A green hillside falling in folds to a flat valley floor, with a pale track running in from the lower left and deep blue shadow in the clefts.
The hill takes the upper two thirds and the valley the lower third, divided by one long level line. The track enters at the bottom left corner and stops short, which is the only movement in the picture.
Sap green, emerald and sage through the hill with the shadows in a hard ultramarine — the collision of those two is the picture's whole argument. The track is bone and ochre.
Thick and directional, every stroke running with the fall of the slope so the paint itself describes the land. The shadows are single decisive pulls of unmixed blue laid straight down the folds.
Oil on canvas paper with an unpainted margin. Photographed on the studio table with the tube colours used.
Lower left, raypatrick, scratched into the wet paint in orange.