Cyclo Rider in a Sepia-Toned Market Street at Dawn — Print & Oil Painting

One colour runs this whole canvas. Ochre, sepia, honey and pale gold are used for the sky, the trees, the road, the buildings and the clothes alike, and nothing anywhere has been allowed a second hue. No blue, no green, no red. The picture is effectively a monochrome that happens to be warm, and the only variation available to the artist is between light and dark within that single family.

Two rows of tall trees line the avenue and their crowns meet overhead. Their foliage is dabbed on in pale gold and cream, thin enough for the sky to come through in dozens of small gaps, and their trunks are pale and heavily mottled. They recede in pairs toward the centre, where a low sun sits as a soft white patch just above the road and burns the far end of the street out completely.

The paving is the most carefully worked passage. It is broken into hundreds of small flat strokes of cream, tan and rust, wet in places and catching the light, and set into it are two pairs of dark parallel lines running the length of the street. They are tram rails, and they are the only ruled straight marks in a picture otherwise built entirely from dabs.

The cyclo comes down the centre with its driver seated high at the rear, pedalling away from the viewer, its hood folded and its wheels drawn as open dark loops. It sits directly between the two sets of rails, and the perspective of the tracks pushes it toward the light at the far end.

The rest of the traffic is placed along the edges: two women in ao dai sharing a bicycle at the left, a woman in a conical hat with a shoulder pole and another walking beside her at the right, a bicycle propped against a shopfront, and a scatter of small figures at the vanishing point. A signature sits in the lower left. From our Vietnam collection, near a golden toned alley with two cyclists under hazy light and old street vendors working beneath tangled power lines.