Two Children Walking Past Chickens on a Brick Village Lane — Print & Oil Painting

This is the quietest kind of painting in the group, and its subject is masonry. The lane runs back between old walls, and the artist has given each wall its own construction: coursed laterite blocks on the left in tan and rust, patched render further along, a section of dark red brick at the lower left where the surface has gone, and on the right a long limewashed wall streaked grey and green with damp. The roofs above them are tiled and sagging.

The paving is laid brick, and it has been painted with real attention. Individual bricks are picked out near the foreground in dusty rose, ochre and grey, and the courses run in a herringbone that pulls the eye down the lane. Further back the pattern dissolves into a smooth warm plane. That transition from described to suggested does the work that perspective lines would do elsewhere.

Three figures walk toward us in the middle of the lane. A taller one in a dark cap and pale shirt leads with an arm out on either side, and two smaller children keep pace beside him, the left in muted grey and the right in a bright orange top. A small animal moves at their feet. They are the only bright note in the picture and they occupy perhaps a twentieth of it.

Along the lower left, close to the wall, a few fowl scratch in the dust, brown and rust coloured and painted with a lighter touch than anything else. Opposite them the right hand wall carries a row of potted plants, terracotta pots with green spilling out of them, and a climbing shrub reaching up over the render.

A concrete pole stands at the left with three wires running off it across the sky, and above everything the trees close in, painted loosely in mid green against a pale overcast. The measured saturation is among the lowest in this group, which suits a picture whose colour comes from weathered clay rather than from paint. From our Vietnam collection, near a child playing with a dog on a bougainvillea-lined brick lane and an elderly man with a cane passing through a brick archway.