Blue-Toned Stilt Houses Among Reeds with Two Moored Boats — Print & Oil Painting

The top fifth of this canvas is flat unbroken ultramarine, laid on smooth and left completely empty, and it is the calmest area in the picture. Everything below it is the opposite: a dense vertical thicket of knife strokes standing shoulder to shoulder across the full width, in blue, white, cadmium yellow, orange and pale green. The contrast between the still band and the agitated field is the design.

Those vertical strokes are reeds, and the painter has cut them with the edge of the blade so that each one holds a hard line and a raised ridge of paint. They are packed tightly enough that the houses have to push through them rather than stand clear, and the eye keeps losing the architecture in the vegetation.

Two stilt houses emerge from it, one left of centre and one at the right. Their roofs are pale blue grey, pitched steeply and given as a few broad clean strokes, and they are the only large flat shapes below the sky. Beneath them the walls dissolve into orange and gold, which read at once as lamplight inside and as reflection outside.

The hot colour is what makes the picture work. Blocks of orange, tangerine and cadmium yellow sit low among the reeds and repeat down into the water, so a canvas that is overwhelmingly blue carries a full complementary charge through its middle band. The measured saturation is high, and the hue reading lands in the blues.

At the centre bottom two boats lie moored side by side, the nearer with a teal hull and an orange interior, the further one darker, both drawn as long shallow curves. Below them the water is broken into short vertical dashes of blue, white and gold. Part of our Vietnam collection, alongside a floating village at moonlight and a floating village reflected in a fiery orange sunset.