Cellist Embracing Her Instrument in Amber Light — Print & Oil Painting

The instrument holds the picture upright. The scroll and its pegs sit at the very top edge, the neck falls as one long dark diagonal through the upper third, the body opens into a broad amber oval at the centre, and the endpin runs down to a floor of scraped ochre. Remove the cello and the composition has no vertical left in it.

She is seated with the knees carried wide to take the body of the wood, the torso turned into three quarters, the head bowed and the eyes closed. Both arms come forward around the neck of the instrument and the hands meet on the far side. There is no bow anywhere in the frame and the fingers are nowhere near the fingerboard. This is not a performance, it is a hold.

The colour is split down the middle. Warm ochre, cadmium orange and cream carry the figure, the wood and the lower right corner; behind her the wall goes cold, slate blue at the left and a thin pale blue wash at the right, with one strip of scarlet against the far left edge. The two temperatures meet along the line of the shoulder without any transition being painted.

Every stroke is long and loaded and follows the direction of the form it describes, and the edges are left open so that the arm dissolves into the background in three or four places. A small green and a small red touch sit in the hair behind the ear, the only saturated marks above the waist.

Beneath the stool the artist has laid a broad reflected pool of orange and gold that carries the whole weight of the seated pose down to the bottom edge. From our Vietnam collection, and a natural companion to a Vietnamese fairy playing a lute amid floating petals.