Cyclo Rider Passing Market Stalls on a Rainy Avenue — Print & Oil Painting

The wet road divides this picture into a warm bank and a cool one. Everything down the left is lit by the stall lamps and comes back off the surface as long streaks of amber, rust and gold. Everything down the right is lit by the grey sky and returns as blue, steel and pale green. The two run side by side the full depth of the avenue and meet along a rough seam at the centre, which is exactly where the rider is placed.

He is seen from directly behind, seated and pedalling away, in a white shirt, dark blue trousers and a soft tan bucket hat. The cyclo in front of him carries a load covered by a blue sheet with a white bundle tucked beside it, and his back is the only large clean shape in the lower half of the canvas.

The stalls on the left are the busier of the two banks. Their awnings run back in overlapping pale sheets, warm light pools beneath them, and a handcart with a pale canopy stands nearest the viewer with a vendor beside it. Further along a woman in a conical hat crosses the road with a basket, and figures in white and red move between the tables.

The right bank is cooler and more modern. Blue and teal awnings shelter a group of people standing with pale umbrellas, a lit shopfront glows at the far right, and in the immediate foreground a motorbike is parked at the kerb with its wheels and mudguards carefully described. That machine is the one object in the picture that fixes it firmly in the present day.

Above the awnings the buildings climb into a soft grey haze, four or five storeys of shuttered concrete with wires strung across them and a mass of green foliage at the upper right. Rain is not drawn as falling anywhere: it is stated entirely by what the ground is doing. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, near a cyclo driver crossing a flooded street in the rain and a cyclo rider in a sepia toned market street at dawn.