Church Spire Framed by Red and Orange Trees — Print & Oil Painting

The title names two trees and the picture contains three. A scarlet one holds the left edge, a gold and orange one the right, and directly behind the church, in the exact centre of the canvas, stands a third worked entirely in cobalt and turquoise. It is smaller than the other two and it is the only cool mass in the whole work, which is why it registers as strongly as it does from that distance.

The church between them is painted in grey and bone with a steep spire and a stepped gable, its openings marked as narrow dark slots. It has been kept almost colourless on purpose, so that the three canopies read as the event and the building as the thing they surround. Behind it the street runs back to a pale horizon under a soft blue sky.

Both sides of the road are lined with market awnings. They are stretched flat in white, grey and pale ochre, edged with a dark line, and they step back at regular intervals so that they measure the depth of the street more accurately than the buildings do. Beneath them the stalls carry heaps of red and orange blooms, brightest on the right where a bicycle stands loaded.

The road is a broad band of grey green, wet enough to return the figures as short vertical smears, and it takes up the whole lower third. Fallen leaves lie scattered across it in red at the left and gold at the right, following the tree above each side.

Three women stand together at the bottom centre, in white, deep blue and red ao dai with white conical hats, gathered around a bicycle and seen from behind. They are the largest figures in the picture and the only group that has stopped moving; everyone else, the cyclist at the centre, the vendors, the walkers under the awnings, is in transit. From our Vietnam collection, near a blue flowering tree set beside a red autumn tree and a neo-Gothic cathedral facade seen on a misty street.