Old Quarter Street Between a Green and a Red Tree — Print & Oil Painting

Two trees hold the ends of the canvas and they have been painted at opposite temperatures. The one at the left carries a canopy of yellow green and cream on a slim dark trunk. The one at the right is orange, scarlet and gold on a thick pale streaked trunk that runs the full height of the picture. Everything else happens in the gap between them.

What fills that gap is a stack of old quarter houses: grey white walls, red brown tiled roofs pitched at four or five different angles, small shuttered windows, one corrugated awning, gables layered one behind another. The street does not so much recede as fold back on itself, and no single vanishing point governs it.

The ground is pale blue grey, wet, with orange leaves scattered over it. This is where the two trees actually meet, because the light coming back off the paving carries the warm and the cool at once and neither wins. It is the calmest passage in the work and it occupies the whole lower quarter.

Four people are in the street. A white bicycle is propped at the lower left with a figure in white under a conical hat and a figure in blue standing beside it, one of them holding a long pole. Under the red tree at the lower right two more sit at a low white stall beneath a pale awning. For a picture of a city street it is remarkably empty.

A small wedge of pale blue at the top centre is all the sky allowed. Saturation measures low, which the grey buildings and the grey road account for even with two loud trees standing in the frame. From our Vietnam collection, near a blue flowering tree set beside a red autumn tree and a cyclo passing between contrasting green and red trees.