May Burst

Oil on Board, 12 x 17 inches

Rarer than hens' teeth, a new Peter Barker painting - can you believe it? Well, the new gallery has taken up a lot of my time lately and it has gone superbly well, and if you haven't seen it yet, take a look at the website at Peter Barker Fine Art

However, with my own solo show in Devon in November, and with a lot of paintings to do, I have GOT to get down to it.

This one is a view as I drive to the gallery each morning, looking across the Welland valley of the Rutland countryside.  Using a heavily-textured board, I was able to suggest the broken effect of the rape-seed fields luminous yellow, just as the flowers were going over. Using some artistic licence I put some cow Parsley in the foreground in order to create some extra depth to the composition, with the effect of looking over a hedge, which is exactly what I was doing! 

Apart from the glorious May blossoms breaking out across the valley, with the Hawthorns picked out with shafts of sunlight, the hook for the painting was that beautiful white cloud against a dark sky - that fleeting light effect that can disappear in seconds.  Yum-yum!