Child Playing with a Dog on a Bougainvillea-Lined Brick Lane — Print & Oil Painting

The lane has been paved brick by brick and the painting counts every one. Small rectangular bricks are laid flat in long courses running away from the viewer, each given its own colour between ochre, tan, rose and grey, with moss and dirt worked into the joints and whole patches worn smooth. That surface takes up the entire lower half of the canvas and it is the most patiently worked passage in the picture.

Across it falls dappled light. Pale gold patches lie over the brick in irregular shapes, densest down the middle of the lane and broken at the edges, and they are what turn a flat floor into a lit one. Nothing casts a hard shadow anywhere.

The walls are the same brick standing upright. They run down both sides in old stretcher bond, grey rendered in places and bare in others, and at the centre right a dark timber gate is set into one under a heavy projecting hood of blackened wood. Behind them a house shows a tiled roof of pale terracotta and one shuttered window.

A bougainvillea takes the entire left side. It climbs the wall and spills forward over the lane in a mass of green leaves with magenta and rose bracts scattered through, densest at the top corner and thinning as it comes down, and it is the only saturated colour in a picture otherwise built from brick and shadow.

Two events share the lane. A small child in a pale top and shorts runs at the centre with one arm thrown up, and a tan dog runs beside him with its tail raised, both caught in mid stride. Further back a woman in a conical hat and a rose coloured top walks away carrying something red. Two large terracotta jars stand against the wall at the lower right, and a small pink object lies on the ground near the gate. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, near two children walking past chickens on a brick village lane and a bicycle propped against a weathered brick alley wall.