Ben Thanh Market Tower With Motorbike Traffic — Print & Oil Painting

Where a companion sheet crops in tight on this building, here it has been given air on every side, and the picture is organised around that decision. The market is pushed back into the middle distance and reduced to about a third of the height, a real tree occupies the entire right edge in the immediate foreground, and a bank of flowers runs along the bottom. The subject is the same. The distance is not.

That tree is the anchor. Its trunk is a broad column of grey, lavender and warm brown rising unbroken from the lower edge to the top of the sheet, painted wet enough that the colours bleed into one another, and it is the only object in the picture that is close to the viewer. Everything else is read past it.

The building itself is handled in cool restraint: pale grey walls, a red tiled roofline running left and right, the clock tower under its terracotta cap, the lettering, the arcades with their blue shopfronts, and behind it a row of taller pale blocks barely indicated. The canopy above breaks into spattered droplets of blue, gold and violet thrown across the wet sky.

The road is a wide band of grey and lilac wash, and it is the emptiest part of the sheet. Nine or ten motorbikes are strung across it at three different depths, together with a pale van at the right, each rider a few decisive strokes, and their scattering rather than their detail is what makes the space feel wide.

The lower edge answers the tree with colour. Crimson, magenta, orange and green are dropped into a wet strip along the whole width, running together into a bed of blossom with no single flower drawn in it. From our Vietnam collection, alongside the same clock tower cropped close in watercolour and a grey monochrome treatment of the same market front.