Old Street Vendors Beneath Tangled Power Lines — Print & Oil Painting

Two verticals bracket this street. A great tree fills the left third, its bright yellow green canopy reaching the top edge on a pale heavy trunk. At the right a utility pole carries a transformer box and a mass of cable. One is grown and one is built, they stand at about the same height, and the whole receding street is strung between them.

The wires leave that pole in every direction and cross the upper right in a loose net, some slack, some pulled tight, drawn with a fine brush directly over the finished buildings. Where the tree gives the left side of the picture its bulk, the wires give the right side its detail, and the two halves balance without resembling each other.

Between them the old quarter climbs away: grey white and ochre houses with red tiled roofs, balconies, a blue awning at the centre, stepping back until they meet a bright blue sky with white cloud. A second tree in orange stands over the right hand pavement.

The two largest figures are at the bottom of the canvas and both are seen from behind. Each carries a shoulder pole with a basket at either end, one heaped with magenta and red blooms, the other with orange and yellow, and both are walking out of the picture toward the viewer. Their loads are the most saturated colour anywhere in the work.

Everything else in the street is smaller and looser: a cyclo with its driver at the centre, a cyclist in blue, a scatter of pedestrians, two figures in orange and blue over at the right. Saturation measures moderate against a middling value, which suits a grey street carrying two bright loads. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, near cyclos and flower laden bicycles beneath a bright canopy and tangled wires on a pole beside a red shuttered wall.