Expressive Multicolor Portrait of a Grinning Young Boy — Print & Oil Painting

The face has been assembled from colours that have nothing to do with skin. Green runs down the bridge of the nose and across one cheek, cobalt sits under the eye and along the jaw, orange and vermilion cut across the forehead and the mouth, and yellow ochre carries the light on the temple. None of it is blended. Each stroke is laid on top of the last while still wet and left with its own edge, and the head only reads as a head because the drawing underneath is exact.

That drawing is the discipline holding the picture together. The skull is correct, the eye sockets are set at the right depth, the ear is in the right place, and the line of the jaw is unbroken from chin to neck. The colour is free precisely because the structure is not.

He is grinning, and it is a specific grin: mouth pulled wide and open on one side, upper teeth showing as a short white bar, one cheek bunched up hard enough to narrow the eye above it. The two eyes are therefore doing different things, one nearly shut and one wide, and the head is tilted and turned so that he looks off to his left rather than at us. It is the expression of someone caught mid laugh by a person standing beside the painter.

The hair is the darkest passage on the canvas, a mass of near black worked with the brush end and left ragged around the crown, and it frames the colour without competing with it. Below the neck the shirt is grey blue and slate, painted much more loosely, with a dark collar and one small yellow mark where a button would be.

The background is left as broad vertical drags of olive, grey green and warm grey, lighter behind the right side of the head and darker behind the left, which is all the modelling the space needs. The measured value is among the lowest here, held down by the hair and the shoulders rather than by the face. From our Vietnam collection, near an elderly woman laughing while smoking a cigarette and a Hmong girl in a red headscarf selling woven textiles.