Cyclo Waiting Beneath Flame Trees on a Rainy Green Street — Print & Oil Painting

The red tree at the right has stained the road beneath it. A broad wash of rose and scarlet lies across the wet surface directly below the canopy, spreading out from the kerb toward the centre of the street, and it is far larger and softer than any of the petals that produced it. The tree is therefore present twice in this picture: as a mass of hard separate leaves above, and as one continuous stain underfoot.

The cyclo waits inside that stain. Angled across the lower right with its hood raised and its bench empty, drawn in thin dark line with a red seat, it is the only vehicle in the work and it is stationary. Nothing suggests it has just arrived or is about to leave.

Elsewhere the ground is green. A cool emerald and jade runs from the left edge to the centre, palest along the middle where the light falls, and it is separated from the red patch by nothing more than a soft transition, so the two colours meet in the open road with no boundary drawn between them.

Above, the composition is built from three canopies at three temperatures: pink blossom crowding the upper left over the rooftops, a broad green crown at the centre on a bare curving trunk, and the scarlet mass at the right. The buildings beneath are flat planes of white, ochre, red and blue with hard clean edges, and their awnings are folded white sheets with no texture at all.

Two women in white ao dai and conical hats stand at the centre of the road, small and turned away, and a bed of pink and white blossom runs along the pavement at the lower left. The measured brightness is high and the saturation moderate, which suits a canvas of pale planes carrying two strong tree colours. From our Vietnam collection, near women in non la hats on a blossoming rainy street and a windswept orange tree above a red cyclo.