May Sky, Richmond Park

A May sky, all cumulus and clean blue, taking up two-thirds of the page. Below it a line of oaks coming into full leaf across an open meadow, a strip of red roof showing through the trees on the right. The painting is mostly the sky — wet-into-wet, the cloud lifted with a clean brush, the blue going deep behind it.

An original watercolour study of a May sky over Richmond Park, painted on Arches Rough 100% cotton. The park has been a deer park since Charles I enclosed it in 1637, and four centuries of grazing have kept it open — oak woods edging meadows, the odd keeper’s cottage tucked under a tree-line — so the sky carries the picture. Several hundred red and fallow deer still roam the 2,500 acres; the trees and the weather have stayed the constants.