Red-Roofed Houses Beside a Pink Blossom Tree — Print & Oil Painting

A cold grey sky takes the upper half of this canvas and gives nothing back. It has been scrubbed on in wide circular sweeps of slate, pewter and dirty white, with no cloud shaped and no light source anywhere in it, and it presses down onto the roofs like bad weather about to arrive. Against that ceiling the village below is painted in the hottest colours on the palette.

The roofs are the whole event. Eight or nine of them are stacked across the middle of the picture as sharp triangular wedges in vermilion, scarlet, tangerine and burnt gold, each laid down in a few loaded pulls of the knife with the strokes running along the slope. They overlap without joining, none of them agrees with its neighbour about the horizon, and no two are lit from the same direction. The result is a cluster that reads as built over generations rather than designed.

Beneath them the walls are white and pale yellow, scraped thin, with dark slots for doors and a single balustrade picked out at the right. Below that the ground drops into a broad dark band of near black and umber, and the paint has been left to run down through it in several thin vertical dribbles.

The tree at the left is the counterweight. Its blossom is coral and salmon pink, built from separate rounded dabs packed into two loose masses, and it is carried on two bare white trunks so slender they barely seem able to hold it. Because the pink is cool where the roofs are hot, the two halves of the canvas argue with each other across the middle.

Three small figures work the bottom left corner: two women under conical hats, one in white and one in blue, bent over a flat basket heaped with yellow and orange blooms, with a third figure in red standing further back beside a pole. They are the only people in the village and they are very small. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, near an abstract mosaic of pastel rooftops in a hillside village and a red roofed house beneath a blossoming tree on a hill.