Lone Farmer on a Misty Green Riverbank — Print & Oil Painting

Three bands and one figure. A soft grey blue sky fills the top half, a dense dark green bank runs across the middle, and a pale turquoise sheet of water lies below. The bands carry almost no incident of their own, and the entire picture depends on one small white mark placed exactly on the seam between the first two.

That mark is a person. Bent forward at the waist, in a white conical hat and a pale top over dark trousers, working at something the picture does not show us. The figure stands perhaps a fortieth of the canvas height, and scale is the whole subject: everything else here exists to make one small shape carry.

The bank is laid in with wide loose sweeps of emerald, sap green and near black, worked wet into wet, with a lighter mass of foliage rising at the upper left and a pale yellow green plant at the upper right. Nothing in it is drawn. It functions as a weight across the middle rather than as a described place.

Below it a broad pale turquoise sheet runs in long downward strokes with a softly rounded top edge, set inside a very dark green surround. It is the brightest area in the work and it sits at the very bottom, which is unusual, and it keeps the eye travelling downward after it has found the figure.

A line of small white flowers runs along a dark edge at the left, and the horizon behind the bank glows a pale cream yellow. Saturation measures high against a low value with the hue in the blue greens, which the dark bank and the turquoise water together account for. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, near a lone fisherman poling a sampan across a misty golden river and women harvesting water spinach from an algae covered lake.