Woman Holding Red Blossoms Against a Warm Abstract Backdrop — Print & Oil Painting

The same flowers appear three times in this picture and at three different degrees of finish. In her cupped hands they are almost drawn: separate red and orange petals with a green stem or two, the most resolved passage on the canvas. Behind her shoulders they clot into a dark band of crimson and near black in which no single bloom is legible. Down the side of her dress they dissolve altogether and become red stains inside the fabric rather than objects lying on it. One motif, losing definition with every step back.

Almost nothing else here has an edge. The paint is blended smooth across the entire surface, each form running into its neighbour with no join between them, and the background is a warm gradient of apricot, rose and magenta with a paler vertical band at the left that suggests a wall without ever becoming one. The single hard passage in the work is her hair.

That hair anchors the design. A heavy black mass sweeps back from the forehead and streams out behind her to the right, painted with real weight and given the darkest value on the canvas, and it holds the whole warm field in place. Without it the picture would have no fixed point.

She stands in profile facing left, head bowed a little toward her hands, shoulders and arms bare, in a simple pale cream dress that takes the light along the front of the body and drops to rose in the shadows. Her expression is quiet and turned down toward what she is carrying, and the painting asks for no more incident than that. From our Vietnam collection, beside a white ao dai and conical hat set into a crust of pink blossom and a branch of red blossoms drawn in ink and watercolour.