Cyclo Passing Beneath Contrasting Green and Red Trees — Print & Oil Painting

The light in this street comes from the far end. The centre of the canvas, where the road recedes between the buildings, is pale gold and almost white, and everything near the viewer sits progressively deeper in shadow. That reversal is what gives a fairly small picture its depth: the eye is pulled back toward the brightness rather than held at the front.

Because of it the left hand houses are read almost as silhouette. Their walls are ochre and slate blue with red brick showing through, their shutters and balcony rails are laid in as hard dark blue strokes, and the shadowed undersides of the eaves are close to black. Detail survives only where the light reaches the upper storey.

The wet road takes that far brightness and drags it forward. Long vertical pulls of gold, cream and pale blue run from the middle distance down to the bottom edge, broken into separate strokes, and they carry more light than the sky does. Nothing on the surface is mirrored accurately; what comes back is the glow and the rhythm.

The cyclo sits at the centre of it. Seen almost end on, it carries a driver in teal at the rear and a load of pale blooms in the passenger seat, and its wheels and frame are drawn in thin dark line straight over the wet road. To the right a cyclist in blue rides away, and further back a second cyclo waits under the trees.

Two canopies close the top of the frame, one green and yellow at the centre left, one scarlet and orange at the right, and both are built from small separate leaf dabs on dark limbs. At the lower left two women in conical hats stand talking, one in a red top with a shoulder pole across her back. From our Vietnam collection, near a blue flowering tree set beside a red autumn tree and a cyclist passing blossom trees on a colourful Saigon street.