Saigon Skyline Ablaze With Sunset Clouds — Print & Oil Painting

This is a photograph taken from a great height, and the cloud is what it is really about. A field of small rounded altocumulus fills the entire upper half, each cell lit along its underside, and because they repeat at a regular size across the whole width they read as a textured ceiling rather than as weather. The colour runs from deep crimson at the top corners through vermilion to a band of pure orange along the horizon.

Below the cloud the sky clears into one unbroken strip of gold, and that strip is the brightest thing in the frame. The city stands against it in near silhouette, so the entire middle band of the image is a dark irregular edge of rooftops and towers cut out of light.

One tower breaks the line. Tall, slender and tapering, with a disc projecting from its upper flank and a lit crown above, it stands right of centre and rises well clear of everything around it. A second, blockier tower with a lit rooftop sits further right, and a cluster of smaller high rises holds the left.

The river does the composing. It enters at the right, loops behind the towers and runs away to the left, and because the last of the sunset lies flat on it, the water returns as a pale bronze ribbon threading behind the dark city. A bridge crosses it at the right with its deck picked out in points of light.

At street level the exposure has caught thousands of separate lamps: window grids on the office blocks, orange sodium along the avenues, white points scattered through the low roofs of the older quarters. The measured saturation is the highest in this group while the value stays low, which is precisely what a dark city under a burning sky produces. Part of our Vietnam collection, alongside a golden and red sunset glowing over the same skyline and an abstract blue skyline built from textured brushstrokes.