Sarrita King | 'Lightning, 2026' | 40x80cm

Code: DDSK26069

Artist: Sarrita King

Title: Lightning

Area: Darwin, NT

Community: Gurindji / Waanyi

Medium: Acrylic On Canvas

Size: 40x80cm

Year: 2026

Sarrita King's Lightning paintings are a painted memory of the electrical storms of Darwin, where she spent her youth. The lightning cracked across the whole sky in lines not unlike cracked earth, and with it came winds that whipped dust, rain and heat into a maelstrom of energy in the air. Every storm revealed new patterns and new colour.

Here she has pushed that colour to its limit. A tropical turquoise, somewhere between aqua, verdigris and the green-blue of storm light on water, floods the full length of the canvas over a jet-black ground, so that every mark reads as light rather than pigment. It is an electric palette, and an unusual one within the series, where King more often works in the whites, silvers and steel-greys of the strike itself. Here the storm is rendered entirely in colour.

Fine white lines fork and branch across the surface, dividing it into irregular cells the way lightning splits a night sky, or drought splits open the ground. Between them the paint is worked in thousands of hair-fine strokes radiating from bright central points, each flaring into a soft fan of light. Where the fans meet the turquoise deepens to a dense teal; where they open out it lifts to a pale, luminous aqua. The effect is of energy caught mid-discharge: charge gathering, releasing, dissipating into the dark.

At a distance the painting resolves into a single field of shifting green-blue, tidal and quietly hypnotic. Up close it is an exercise in discipline, every line traced by hand without repetition or shortcut. That combination of atmospheric force and meticulous control has made Lightning the most recognised and most collected body of work in King's twenty-year career.

The vertical format suits the subject. The eye travels the canvas the way a strike travels the sky, and the work carries strongly in a tall or narrow space: a stairwell, an entry, a hallway or a column of wall beside a doorway