Aerial Swirl of Flooded Terraced Rice Paddies — Print & Oil Painting

What registers first is a system of lines. Every terrace is held by a raised bund, and seen from directly overhead those bunds become long dark curves nesting inside one another across the whole width, crowding together where the slope steepens and opening out where it flattens. The hillside has been reduced to contour.

Between the lines the paddies are flooded, and because the water is still it gives back the sky. Pale blue, white cloud and a wash of warm gold lie on the ground in sheets, so the slope is not so much lit from above as filled with sky from below. That inversion is the whole appeal of the view.

Where the crop has taken hold the water disappears. Three or four terraces at the lower centre and the middle are solid bright green, and they read as the only opaque areas in an image otherwise built entirely from reflections. Ochre and rust patches over at the right mark bare wet mud.

Small dark clumps of bush sit on the bunds at intervals, and a handful of tiny figures walk one terrace edge at the upper left with their reflections directly beneath them. They are the only scale on offer. Without them the formation could be twenty metres across or two hundred.

The image reads as a photograph rather than as a painted surface: no brush or knife mark appears anywhere and the focus softens toward the top edge. Saturation measures moderate against a high contrast, which the dark bunds against bright water produce. From our Vietnam collection, near golden terraced rice fields rising into the mist and an overhead view of basket boats on a winding green canal.