Golden-Toned Alley With Cyclists Under Hazy Light — Print & Oil Painting

One hue covers everything. Ochre, chrome yellow, cream and white are used for the walls, the awnings, the road and the sky alike, so no object in the picture is painted the colour it is. Each is painted the colour of the light falling on it, and the light is the same everywhere.

A tall utility pole with cross arms stands at the left, black and hard edged, and it is the only true dark in the canvas apart from a few window openings and the bicycle. It carries the entire tonal range of the picture by itself, and without it the whole thing would float.

The alley narrows to a burnt white patch at the centre of the horizon. The buildings on both sides are knifed on as slabs that grow smaller and paler as they recede, wires cross the gap between them, and two or three tiny figures stand out in the road at that distance, no more than three strokes each.

At the lower right two riders sit side by side seen from behind, both in red tops under white conical hats, their bicycle stated with a handful of dark strokes and no completed frame. The red is small, low and off centre, and it is the only place where the colour scheme is broken.

The knife work is heavy throughout, paint scraped, dragged and left ridged so that the surface catches real light of its own. Saturation measures moderate against a high brightness, which is the profile of a canvas built almost entirely from pale yellows. From our Vietnam collection, near a golden old street set between a bare tree and a blossoming one and a cyclo rider in a sepia toned market street at dawn.