Sheep in Early Spring Fields, Fife

Here's a painting which is going to on show in London in the autumn.  

Earlier in the year I was travelling through to Fife to visit family, and it was a wonderfully bright, clear spring day.  I saw these beautiful clouds over the bare fields, with the lovely reddish-purpley coloured earth.  It was like travelling through a William Gillies landscape.

Sheep in Early Spring Fields, Fife (Oil on linen, 20 x 20)

The sheep in the foreground have dirty winter coats, so that they almost become part of  the colour of the land.  There is a bright, white-painted farmhouse on the crest of the hill, and there is a track that leads through the fields, linking your eye between the sheep and the house, so that you're travelling up and through the fields yourself, going on a little journey through the landscape.

It was a scene that I saw only very quickly, but I always have my camera on hand, and you learn to anticipate the elements of the landscape lining up and to read the composition coming together, and so have the camera ready to take the shot.