Narrow Alley With Cascading Bougainvillea — Print & Oil Painting

The canvas is tall and narrow and the alley inside it is narrower still. Walls press in from both edges, close enough that no sky is visible except a small pale wedge at the top, and the passage runs back only a short distance before a cross wall and a green shuttered door stop it. This is not a street that leads anywhere. It is a slot between buildings, and the picture has been shaped to match.

Surfaces are the real subject. The left wall is limewashed white gone grey, blistered and flaking, with a small turquoise window sunk into it. The right wall is worse and better: ochre plaster fallen away in sheets to show brick and rubble beneath, patched with green damp, hung with a rusted grille and a corrugated awning. Every square of it has been given a different texture, and the paint is dragged and scraped to get them.

Into all that decay one thing is thriving. A bougainvillea climbs the upper left and spills down across the whole top third in magenta, rose, cream and pale yellow, its bracts laid on as small separate touches with dark green leaves worked between them. It is the only saturated area on the canvas, and it grows out of a plain white pot standing on the ground below.

The petals have fallen and they organise the floor. They lie thickest just under the plant, then scatter forward down the middle of the alley in ones and twos, drawing a rough path along the wet flagstones toward the viewer. Without them the lower half would be nothing but grey stone.

Wires cross the gap overhead in several slack lines, and a small red and blue rectangle of laundry hangs at the far end. The measured saturation is low, which the two grey walls fully explain even with the flower present. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, near a bicycle propped against a weathered brick alley wall and a rose framed garden path leading to stone pillars.