Along The River

A pale sandbar and river run horizontally across the middle, painted in cream and grey with the knife, flat and largely unworked. The event is a burst of cadmium yellow foliage right of centre — the only high-chroma passage in the picture and placed where the eye lands first. Fir boughs in prussian blue crowd both edges; violet-grey hills sit behind. Smith is usually a painter of closed forest interiors, and here she opens the middle distance and leaves it nearly empty. The restraint in the water is what allows the yellow to be that loud.