Vietnamese Fairy Playing a Lute Amid Floating Petals — Print & Oil Painting

The white of the garment is the largest thing in this painting and it is what the composition is built on. A long tunic and loose trousers in the palest blue white fill the entire lower half of the tall frame, the fabric caught mid movement so that it lifts, folds and spills outward in wide soft sweeps well beyond the body inside it. The artist has painted very few hard edges into any of it, letting the cloth dissolve into the background at its extremities.

The garment is an ao dai and it has been observed properly: a high mandarin collar closed at the throat, a fitted bodice, long narrow sleeves reaching the wrist, and the long panels of the tunic falling loose over wide trousers. The tailoring is close through the shoulder and arm and generous everywhere below, which is precisely why it moves the way the picture shows it moving.

She holds a pear bodied lute upright against her chest. Its soundboard is a warm honey brown, the neck carries a run of raised frets, and the pegbox is bent sharply back at the top with four pegs set in pairs, which identifies it as the tyba lute played across Vietnam. Her left hand is high on the neck and her right rests at the strings near the lower bout, fingers slightly curled, in the position for playing rather than for holding.

Everything behind her is atmosphere. A dark tree with sinuous limbs curves around the upper corners in blurred green and teal, pale petals drift through the whole depth of the picture at several scales, and ribbons of luminous blue white light coil around the instrument and out into the folds of the cloth. A single pink petal glows near the bottom edge. The measured saturation is low and the brightness high, which is right: this is a pale picture with two or three saturated accents in it.

The face is the quietest part of the whole design and that is a deliberate choice. Long auburn hair streams to the left as though the same air moving the cloth were moving it, but the features are still, the eyes are lowered toward the strings, and the mouth is closed. In a canvas where the fabric, the hair, the petals and the light are all in motion, the only thing holding steady is the person doing the work. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, near three women in pink and red with their dresses billowing and three women in white ao dai carrying red lanterns.