Turquoise Trees Framing a Stilt House on the Water — Print & Oil Painting

A single colour runs this painting. Blue fills the water, the air and the distance, the trees standing on it are turquoise, and the only relief anywhere is the pale ochre of a roof and a few strips of acid green weed floating on the surface. The picture comes very close to being a monochrome and is entirely comfortable that way.

The trees are painted as spheres. Each crown is a dense ball of small turquoise and white touches, opaque and very nearly round, set on a slender dark trunk with hardly any branch structure showing, and they are arranged by size: one very large at the top centre, three medium behind and to the right, one small at the lower right on a trunk rising straight out of the water. Reading them from largest to smallest is how the picture builds its depth.

The house is a small thing in all that. One dwelling with a pale corrugated roof stands left of centre on thin stilts, its timber walls warm against everything around them, and a covered wooden boat lies moored directly in front. Bamboo poles stand up out of the shallows nearby in ones and twos.

The water is glass smooth and takes the whole scene back in long horizontal smears, with unexpected streaks of pink, lilac and lime worked into the reflections that have no source at all above the waterline. That small dishonesty is what keeps a very calm surface from going dead. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, near blue toned stilt houses among reeds with two moored boats and stilt houses by the river beneath a leafy tree.