Golden and Red Sunset Glowing Over the Saigon Skyline — Print & Oil Painting

The size of the marks is doing all the distance here. At the horizon the city is a band of tiny separate dots, each barely wider than a bristle, packed so tightly that they read as one continuous glow. Halfway down they have grown into short bars. In the foreground they are broad slabs of impasto standing well off the surface. Nothing is drawn, no building has an outline, and the depth of a very large view is produced by that change of scale alone.

The lit band at the horizon is the brightest passage in the work, brighter than the sky above it. Chrome yellow, lemon and white run across the full width just below the middle, and the sun appears nowhere: whatever is left of it has gone behind the city, and what we are given instead is the light the city makes for itself.

Above that the sky is laid in as one graded field, deep red at the top edge, orange through the middle, gold where it meets the roofs, with a few long dark streaks of cloud dragged flat across it. A tall pale tower stands clear of the skyline at the centre right, and a handful of shorter blocks break the line on either side of it.

The foreground is where the painting goes dark. The near city is worked in deep maroon, violet and near black, and the lights scattered through it are separate warm dabs of orange, gold and pale green, each with its own edge and its own small shadow. They are large enough to count and irregular enough to read as windows rather than as a pattern. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, near a Saigon skyline photographed from height beneath a field of lit cloud and a grey rainy street below the Bitexco tower.