Bustling Market Street Under Colorful Striped Awnings — Print & Oil Painting

The street has been built as a funnel. Banks of buildings rise steeply from the left and right edges and lean inward until they almost close at the top centre, where a small patch of pale blue sky and its answering reflection on the wet ground make the only quiet area in the picture. Everything else is packed solid.

The awnings do the structural work. A run of them crosses each side at the same height, striped in cobalt, teal and yellow, cutting one firm horizontal through a composition that is otherwise all vertical clutter. Below that line the painting becomes people. Above it, it becomes shopfronts, signs and balconies, each a separate small block of knifed colour with no drawing underneath to hold it in place.

Not one face appears in the crowd. Every shopper is a vertical stroke of saturated colour, magenta, ultramarine, cadmium orange, dropped onto the dark ground and then left alone, and the density of those strokes along both pavements is what makes the street feel loud. The artist has not painted a market so much as its noise.

Two figures in white with conical hats come down the middle of the road toward the viewer, and a third in orange pushes a bicycle stacked with yellow blooms just beside them. Being larger, paler and more widely spaced than anything around them, they read as a held pause inside the racket. The wet road takes the whole scene back down again as long interrupted reflections. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, near a market crowd packed beneath a bright orange tarpaulin and vendors with umbrellas crossing a busy rainy market street.