Ao Dai Woman in Profile Holding Pink Roses — Print & Oil Painting

The hat is used as a mask. Painted as a hard edged white triangle and tipped steeply forward, it takes the whole upper third of the canvas and cuts the head off along a straight diagonal, and beneath that edge only a small wedge of face survives. What we are given is a sliver of pale jaw and one flat mark of magenta for the mouth, and that mark is the sole feature in the entire painting.

Everything else is treated as broad flat shape. The ao dai is cream white with a single soft vertical seam down the front and almost no shadow in it, the ground behind is an even greige, and the hair falls past the shoulder as one solid dark brown mass with a clean silhouette. Three values, three shapes, no detail.

Into that austerity the roses arrive as pure texture. Held in both hands at the waist, the bouquet is worked in heavy impasto, every bloom a small twisted knot of rose, salmon and chalk pink with olive leaves pressed in between, and the paint stands off the surface far enough to catch the light. It is the one passage in the picture with any relief in it.

That contrast is the entire design: a flat pale figure with one dense saturated cluster at the centre of it. The measurement puts overall saturation very low, which is right for the canvas as a whole even though the roses argue otherwise within their own small area. Part of our Vietnam collection, alongside a woman holding red blossoms against a warm abstract backdrop and a woman in white ao dai holding flowers by a shuttered window.