Weathered Wall With an Orange Door and a Cyclo — Print & Oil Painting

Paint has been allowed to run in this picture and the runs are part of the drawing. Long thin dribbles fall from the arched opening at the upper left, from the shutters, from the base of the window frame, and they are left exactly where gravity put them. In a work about a wall that is decaying, the medium has been made to decay in the same direction.

The wall takes almost the whole canvas. It is a warm grey worked with a knife into crusts, pits and raised islands, patched with olive and ochre lichen, with pale scrapes where render has come away, and the surface stands physically off the support in places. Nothing here is drawn as a brick or a stone. The texture is asked to do the describing.

Two openings interrupt it. At the upper left an arched recess is filled with burnt orange, the strongest colour on the canvas, its interior scratched into short vertical lines and its lower lip bleeding downward in four dark drips. To its right a pair of louvred shutters sits in a white frame, painted in bone and pale green, closed and slightly askew.

The cyclo occupies the lower half and it has been treated as line rather than as mass. Its hood, bench, frame and both wheels are laid over the wall in loose black and teal strokes, open and unfilled, with the grey of the background showing straight through the spokes and under the seat. It is drawn on the wall more than it is standing in front of it, and the effect is of an object being absorbed into its own setting.

A small signature sits in the lower left corner. The measured saturation is low and the value middling, which suits a canvas of textured greys carrying one hot accident. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, near a weathered cyclo standing alone in a textured grey street and abstract yellow and blue light falling on an old quarter facade.