Cyclist with Flowers Riding Through a Golden Autumn Street — Print & Oil Painting

The sky and the road are painted the same colour, and the picture takes its strangeness from that. A hot orange gold fills the top of the canvas without a cloud in it, the same orange gold fills the lower half as ground, and where the two meet at the middle distance there is no horizon line to separate them. The village appears to be standing inside one continuous field of light rather than beneath a sky.

Two trees are set into that field, one at the left and one at the right, and both carry blossom in cream, white and pale yellow on dark spreading limbs. Their crowns are built from small thick dabs and their branches are drawn as fine dark lines over the gold, so they read as silhouettes that have been filled in rather than as masses.

The houses between them are given almost no colour at all. Grey and charcoal roofs, white gables, dark open doorways, a low wall running to the right: they are the coolest objects in the work and they sit exactly where the gold is deepest, which is what keeps them from disappearing.

One cyclist crosses the middle of the canvas. She rides a black bicycle from left to right in a conical hat and a dark top, with a wide basket of green and yellow blooms mounted behind the saddle, and she is the only figure in the picture that is moving.

Everyone else is white and still. Two women in ao dai stand at the lower left, three more are grouped at the bottom centre and two at the bottom right, all in white with white hats and all seen from behind, set along the very edge of the canvas like a row of markers. A band of small bright flowers runs across the bottom in red, blue and green. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, near an old street glowing under a golden tree at sunset and a flower seller beside a blue door under autumn foliage.