Close-Up Portrait With a Red Flower Behind Her Ear — Print & Oil Painting

A heavy fall of near black hair comes down from the crown and crosses her cheek in loose strands, and one of them runs straight over the eye. The artist has laid those strands on top of a finished face rather than painting the face around them, which is why they read as hair that has just moved rather than as hair that was arranged.

The eyes are the only fully resolved things here. Grey green, wide and level, meeting the viewer without any softening, each with a clean dark rim and a single white catchlight. Everything else on the canvas is broken, scumbled or dragged, and the difference in finish is what makes the gaze land as hard as it does.

One red bloom sits at her right ear, half buried in the dark mass, and it is the sole saturated colour above the shoulders. Its petals are put down in thick crimson and scarlet strokes with no drawing underneath them, so it stays a knot of paint rather than becoming a botanical fact.

The background is not a room. It is a field of olive, teal, ochre, cream and dull crimson laid on with a knife and a loaded brush, with runs of thinned paint dripping down at the lower left and a pale vertical scraped through at the left edge. Bare canvas shows at the corners, and nothing back there is asked to mean anything.

She wears a white top with one shoulder bare, and the skin at the collarbone carries the same warm pink used in the cheeks. Saturation measures moderate against a low value, which the dark hair and the dim ground between them explain. Nothing in the dress or the setting places the sitter. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, near a golden toned portrait of a woman with downcast eyes and a grey scale portrait of a face streaked by rain.