'Road and Valley' is exceptional in the subtlety of the brushwork employed and the way that this reveals an extraordinary nuance of colour within the dark tonality of the painting as a whole. ‘Road and Valley’ is the earliest of a small group of ‘dark’ paintings which Rhodes created over a twelve year period. These ‘dark’ paintings are amongst Rhodes’s most personal.

Rhodes was very conscious of the mineral or organic nature of many pigments used in oil paint, and related them to the substance of her subjects – coal, rock, vegetation, soil. Here she uses Davies Grey (made from slate), mixed with blacks and violets, controlling in a highly sophisticated way their relative reflectivity and absorption of light.