Golden Terraced Rice Fields Rising Into the Mist — Print & Oil Painting

The terraces are drawn as contour lines and that is what makes the picture legible. Every level of the hillside is edged with a dark curved band, and those bands nest inside one another by the dozen, following the shape of the slope exactly the way lines on a map do. Where the hill turns they crowd together, where it flattens they open out.

Between the lines the paddy is golden. Ochre, wheat and pale yellow are laid in broad soft passages with the brush following those same curves, and the ripe fields occupy the entire middle of the canvas from the lower left corner up to the middle distance on the right.

Around and behind them the picture cools. Dense dark green woodland closes the left edge and the lower right corner, a further green ridge crosses the middle distance, and past it blue grey mountains recede in three or four flat overlapping layers, each paler than the one before, until they reach a hazy sky. A tall column of white smoke rises out of the trees at the left and drifts sideways as it climbs.

People are present but only just. A line of tiny figures works along one terrace edge right of centre, none more than a single dark stroke, and two small buildings with pale roofs sit among the fields. They supply all the scale the picture needs, since without them the terraces could be any size at all. Part of our Vietnam collection, alongside an aerial swirl of flooded terraced paddies and farmers harvesting diagonal rows of golden rice.