Golden Old Street Between Bare and Blossoming Trees — Print & Oil Painting

Gold behaves here as a material rather than as a light. Walls, road, sky and foliage are all variations of amber, honey and burnt orange, built up in the polished layered manner of lacquer with a darker line drawn over the top, and the effect is less of a street at sunset than of a street cast in one substance.

The two trees named in the title do opposite things. The one at the left is bare, a dark open lattice of branches spreading right across the upper left with nothing on it at all. The one at the right is loaded with clusters of pink and coral blossom, the only colour in the entire work that is not gold. They stand at the same height and hold the two upper corners between them.

The lower half reads as a list of ways to travel. A motorbike at the lower left, a parked rank of bicycles beside it, a cyclo carrying a passenger, a cyclist crossing the middle of the road, a cart heaped with green and orange produce with a vendor in a conical hat at the handle, and two further cyclos among the stalls at the right. The street is busy and nobody in it is hurrying.

The buildings are old shophouses on both sides, with balconies, shutters, hanging signs and stretched awnings, each described in fine dark line laid over the gold and then left flat. There is no modelling anywhere: a wall is a plane of colour with lines on it, and the depth comes entirely from overlap.

Saturation measures very high against a low value, which is precisely what an amber field carrying dark linear drawing produces. Between the two trees the road recedes to a pale building at the far end, and that single lighter patch is where the eye finally settles. Part of our Vietnam collection, alongside a panoramic old town beneath a fiery orange sky and a golden toned alley with two cyclists under hazy light.