Cyclos and Flower Bikes Beneath a Bright Canopy — Print & Oil Painting

Colour has been rationed here. Grey, black and white take almost the whole canvas: the road, the buildings, the shadows, most of the figures. Two exceptions are granted, the yellow green of the leaves overhead and the orange red of the flowers below, and nothing else in the picture is permitted a hue at all.

The avenue runs straight away from the viewer and burns out into pure white at the top centre, where the canopy thins and the light comes through unbroken. Everything nearer the viewer is darker, denser and more solidly painted, so the recession is achieved by weight rather than by drawing.

The vehicles are the inventory. Two cyclos stand at the centre left with their passenger seats heaped with orange blooms and a driver in orange waiting beside them, a third is parked further back, a bicycle comes head on down the middle under an enormous load of red and orange flowers, and more loaded bicycles line the trees at the right. On this street the goods have taken the seats.

At the lower left two vendors carry shoulder poles, one in white and one in orange under conical hats, their baskets filled with the same flowers as the bicycles. Fallen green leaves are scattered across the pale paving all the way to the bottom edge, and they are the only sign that the canopy is shedding.

The measured contrast is the highest in this group while the saturation is among the lowest, which is exactly what a near monochrome carrying two loud accents will produce. Part of our Vietnam collection, alongside a cyclist with flowers riding through a golden autumn street and a weathered cyclo standing alone in an empty grey street.