Vivid Blue Tree Over a Street With a Blue Cyclo — Print & Oil Painting

Blue has been made into a system here rather than an accent. The tree overhead is blue, the awnings along the shopfronts are blue, the cyclo parked at the centre right is blue, the road is a pale blue grey and the shutters are blue green. Five unrelated objects have been given the same family of colour, and because they are spaced evenly across the canvas the eye is walked from one to the next without ever leaving the hue.

The tree itself takes the whole upper left. Its foliage is laid on in broad soft strokes of cobalt, sky blue and white with the darker branches drawn through it, and the finish is smooth and blended throughout, with no impasto and no separated leaf shapes. It reads more as a cloud of colour than as a canopy.

What escapes the blue is the roofing. Every tiled roof in the picture, and there are five or six stepping back along both sides of the street, is a strong orange red, and those warm planes are the only heat in the work. A small scarlet tree at the right repeats the note once, quietly.

Two people are seated at the centre and they are the only figures at rest. One in a rust orange top and one in white sit on low stools facing each other across a small table, painted with almost no detail, and their stillness sets the tone for the rest of the street. Further back a woman in white ao dai walks away at the right, and at the left a vendor stands under an awning behind a stall of yellow blooms with red stools set out in front.

The cyclo is empty, angled across the road with its bench and wheels clearly stated, and nobody is anywhere near it. The measured saturation is high while the value stays middling, which the intensity of that canopy explains. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, near cyclists beneath a vivid blue and green tree canopy and a weathered cyclo standing alone in an empty grey street.