Cyclists Beneath a Vivid Blue-Green Tree Canopy — Print & Oil Painting

The canopy carries two colours at once and no tree does that. Chrome yellow leaves and turquoise leaves are mixed through the same branches in roughly equal numbers, each a separate flat oval dab, and neither is confined to a sunlit or a shaded region. What has been done here is to paint light and shadow as two different hues rather than as two values of one, and the whole canvas takes its unusual charge from that decision. The measured saturation is the highest in this group.

The tree itself is enormous. Its pale trunk stands right of centre, straight and lightly ringed, and the branches spread from it to fill the entire top of the picture and run off both upper corners. Everything else is fitted underneath.

The buildings are handled flatly and warmly. At the left a two storey house carries a deep red tiled roof and an open balcony with two small figures leaning on the rail, and beneath it a shaded interior with people seated at low tables. Pink bougainvillea spills over the awning below. Further back a red timber gate closes the courtyard, and at the right a green tiled roof runs out under the branches.

Two women cycle across the open ground, both in white ao dai and conical hats, one at the lower left with a lilac panel to her dress and one at the centre, each drawn with a thin dark outline and almost no modelling. They travel in opposite directions, which keeps the courtyard from having a single flow.

The right corner belongs to the flower sellers. Three or four women in conical hats stand over broad trays heaped with scarlet and white blooms, and a fifth in a pale blue dress walks toward them. Fallen yellow leaves are scattered across the whole courtyard floor, and their shadows are painted turquoise, exactly like the leaves still overhead. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, near a vivid blue tree over a street with a blue cyclo and ao dai students walking beneath a green tree canopy.