Koi Fish Rippling a Pond of White Water Lilies — Print & Oil Painting

Circles organise this picture. A dozen sets of concentric white rings sit on the water, drawn as clean thin ellipses of decreasing size, and they turn the whole surface into a record of small events that have already happened. Nothing else in the painting is anywhere near that geometric.

The water is a deep even green, darkest in the corners, seen from directly overhead with no bank, no sky and no reflection. It behaves exactly the way a plain ground behaves behind a portrait: it describes nothing and it holds everything.

Nine fish are distributed across it at every angle. Most are white with orange red patches, one at the right is solid gold, one at the lower right is black and white. Their long pectoral fins trail behind them as pale translucent shapes, and the white of their bellies is the brightest passage on the canvas.

The plants form a border and stay there. Round green pads sit at the corners and along the edges, white lilies open at the top, the left and the right, a cluster of small crimson blooms crowds the right margin, and a mat of dark floating leaves closes the bottom. The middle of the picture is left entirely to the fish.

Saturation measures low for a work this green, and the reason is on the surface: the pads are laid in flat with their veins drawn on rather than modelled, so a large area of the canvas is one unmodulated colour. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, near koi circling a bed of pale pebbles in a dark pond and a close view of a pink lotus with small fish below.