Blue Flowering Tree Beside a Red Autumn Tree — Print & Oil Painting

The paint stands up off this canvas further than in any other work here. Every blossom on both trees is a single loaded press of the knife, thick enough to hold the mark of the blade and to curl at one edge, and the light catches along those raised rims so that the canopies glitter slightly as the eye moves. Read as texture before it is read as subject, the picture is a field of several thousand separate lumps of paint.

The two trees divide the colour between them and neither trespasses. The one at the left carries blue, sap green, lilac and cream, spread low and wide over the roof of the house. The one at the right is scarlet and vermilion with clear yellow and chalk white worked through it, packed into a tall rounded crown on a slim dark trunk that runs the full height of the canvas.

Beneath them the house is small and low. It is a plain yellow ochre building with a white gable and a red arched door, joined by a length of pale wall with a second red door set in it, and it has been painted with far less loading than the trees, almost scraped flat. The architecture is the quiet part of this picture and it is meant to be.

Petals cover the ground. They begin under the red tree at the right, run in a broad drift across the whole lower third and thin out at the left corner, hundreds of small scarlet dabs on a pale blue grey road, and a few are still in the air at the centre. What is overhead has been printed underfoot.

Two women walk between the trees at the lower right, each in a conical hat with a shoulder pole across the back, one in blue and one in red, carrying flat baskets planted with yellow and green blooms. They are the only figures in the work and they are small enough to be missed at first. From our Vietnam collection, near a cyclo passing between contrasting green and red trees and an old quarter street set between a green tree and a red one.