Flower Vendor on a Misty Street of Blooming Walls — Print & Oil Painting

This is the palest canvas in the group and the measurement agrees: the brightness reading is very high and the saturation stays low. Almost everything is white, chalk blue and pearl grey, scraped on thinly enough that the picture seems to be evaporating from the middle outward. The centre of the street simply dissolves. There is no far end to it, only a bank of light.

A concrete utility pole stands hard against the left edge and it is the only fully solid object in the work. Grey, square in section, fitted with cross arms and a small transformer box, it runs from the bottom of the canvas to the top without a break, and from it a dozen cables sweep out across the sky in long curves that tie the two halves of the picture together.

The right side is where all the colour lives. Old houses lean over the pavement in ochre and cream, their balconies and shutters half described, and their fronts are crusted from ground to roof with flowers: magenta, coral, chrome yellow, lilac and white, laid on as thick separate touches with green pressed between them. A single lit doorway glows orange at the centre right and is the warmest note in the canvas.

A bare tree stands at the middle of the street, thin and leafless, with only a few small pink blooms on its branches. Set between the crowded right and the empty left, it belongs to neither, and its dark line is what stops the mist from swallowing the centre entirely.

Three women in white ao dai and conical hats walk toward the viewer at the lower centre, a basket heaped with pink and yellow blooms stands on the ground beside them, and a man in a blue shirt crosses to the right. Far off in the haze a single small figure with a shoulder pole is reduced to two strokes. From our Vietnam collection, near tangled wires on a pole beside a red shuttered wall and a flower seller carrying baskets on a shoulder pole.