Dense Swarm of Red Koi Fish Feeding Together — Print & Oil Painting

There is no water in this painting. Bodies fill it corner to corner, overlapping three and four deep, and the only glimpses of anything else are the narrow dark blue and black gaps left between them. Composition in the ordinary sense has been abandoned in favour of pressure.

The red is not one colour but twenty. Vermilion, crimson, scarlet and rust are mixed on the canvas rather than on the palette, with a few fish in orange gold, two or three white with red saddles, one blue grey and one blotched black over at the right. The variety is what stops the mass reading as a single flat field.

Five or six fish have come to the surface with their mouths open, and each mouth is a round black hole ringed with pale flesh. Those dark circles are the only true darks anywhere on the surface, and they are spaced widely enough to draw the eye right across the picture from corner to corner.

The paint is heavily loaded. Scales have been scratched and stippled into the wet surface with a point, the highlight along each back is left standing proud, and from close up the canvas reads as relief before it reads as anything else. Step away and it resolves into fish.

Saturation measures high against the lowest value in this group, which is what happens when a canvas is covered edge to edge in a dark strong hue. Scale is impossible to judge: no bank, no hand, no leaf and no horizon is offered. From our Vietnam collection, near koi swimming beneath a branch of yellow apricot blossom and three buffalo submerged in turquoise water.