Yellow Blossom Tree Towering Over a Blue-Toned City Street — Print & Oil Painting

Almost the entire canvas has been painted in one colour family. Cobalt, slate, teal, steel and white build the housing on both sides, the roadway, the shadows and the sky, applied in flat knife strokes that leave hard rectangular edges everywhere. The discipline is severe: there is no brown in the buildings, no warmth in the pavement, and the deepest recesses go to near black rather than to any other hue.

Against that, the tree. It rises through the upper centre and right, and its leaves are yellow and pale green, laid down as broad rounded dabs that catch far more light than anything else in the picture. Its trunk is a thin dark line and its branches are barely indicated. The canopy is doing all the work, and it functions as the single warm exception the painter has allowed.

The left bank of buildings is the more complex half. Shopfronts, balconies, tiled overhangs and shutters are stacked in receding tiers, each a separate loaded stroke, with two small red signs set into them like punctuation. Beneath the awnings a row of goods is suggested by short marks of orange, red and pink, the only other warm passage on the canvas, and it is kept small.

The street itself is nearly empty, and the emptiness is the point. A white car sits mid distance. A figure in a conical hat walks the near foreground with a shoulder pole, two orange loads swinging at the ends of it. A second small figure stands by the kerb. Their scale against the buildings makes the road feel wide and the morning feel early.

The measured hue sits squarely in the cyans and blues, which is exactly what a canvas built from one restricted family should produce, while the brightness stays moderate. Part of our Vietnam collection, near a vivid blue tree over a street with a blue cyclo and an abstract blue skyline in textured brushstrokes.