Farmers Transplanting Rice Beside a Plowing Buffalo — Print & Oil Painting

The weather is drawn, not implied. Fine pale diagonal lines are scored across the entire canvas from upper right to lower left, over the sky, over the hills, over the water and over the people, and they do not stop for anything. Everything in the picture is therefore seen through rain, and the whole upper half has been reduced to bands of wet grey and silver.

The flooded fields behind the figures are painted as horizontal sheets of pale grey and white, divided by thin dark bunds that curve back into the mist. There is no green in them. The colour has been drained out of the landscape entirely and held back for one purpose.

That purpose is the clothing. Every figure in the foreground wears something at full strength: orange, scarlet, cobalt, violet, rose, mustard. Set against the grey field the effect is immediate, and the painter has spaced the colours so that no two of the same sit next to each other. The conical hats are pale gold and they repeat across the bottom of the canvas like a row of markers.

The postures are the subject. Six or seven people are bent from the waist over the water, arms straight down, hands at the surface, transplanting seedlings one at a time, and the painter has caught the specific angle of that work: knees soft, back flat, head below the shoulders. One woman at the right stands upright with a shoulder pole, and one at the lower right steadies a basket. The difference between the bent and the standing is what gives the group its rhythm.

On the left a farmer in blue walks behind a dark buffalo dragging a plough through the shallow water, both of them half lost in the rain. The measured saturation is among the lowest here, which is true of the canvas as a whole even though the clothing reads as bright, because the grey occupies so much more of it. From our Vietnam collection, near a farmer plowing a flooded field with two buffalo in the rain and a line of farmers harvesting rice in diagonal rows.