Flower Sellers Crossing a Bridge Beside Golden Rice Paddies — Print & Oil Painting

A band of ripe yellow runs straight across the middle of this canvas from edge to edge, and it is the flattest passage in the picture. The rice is given no individual stalks and almost no modelling, just a broad even field of gold with a thin green margin where it meets the stream, and a single small house sitting far off in the middle of it under blue hills.

The stream is what breaks that flatness. It enters at the bottom left, widens under a wooden arched footbridge, and then narrows as it winds back through the gold to the horizon, and its pale blue is the only cool line running the full depth of the picture. Lotus pads sit in it at the lower left corner.

Flowers are carried in three different ways, and the picture makes a point of it. On the bridge a figure in red with a conical hat crosses with a shoulder pole. At the lower right a woman in blue walks with a pole across her shoulders and pink blooms heaped at both ends. Between them a low two wheeled cart stands loaded with red and pink flowers while a person in white bends over it. Each method gets its own space on the ochre ground.

The right half is the built half. A small white gateway with a red tiled roof and an arched opening stands under a large tree whose canopy is packed with cream and pale yellow blossom, laid on in dense separate touches. Behind it run the golden thatch roofs of a row of stalls, and beneath them a figure in a conical hat sits among more baskets of colour.

The left foreground answers with planting: a bed of pink and violet blooms, a shrub in strong scarlet, a spiky green palm and a stand of pale trees. Birds cross the upper left sky in small strokes. The hue reading falls in the oranges with a cyan second, which is the arithmetic of a gold field cut by a blue stream. From our Vietnam collection, alongside flower sellers sorting piles of marigolds and pink blooms and golden terraced rice fields rising into the mist.