Busy Saigon Street With a Distant Skyscraper — Print & Oil Painting

Blue holds this canvas together. It is in the open sky across the upper third, in the shadowed sides of the buildings, in the awnings, in the doorways, and in the pooled water of the road, and because it recurs at every distance the eye reads the whole street as one continuous space rather than a stack of separate flats.

At the centre, far back, a tall pale tower rises out of the rooftops. It is scraped in with white and grey, tapering as it climbs, with a horizontal projection near the top that catches the light, and it has been left deliberately vague. Nothing else in the picture reaches even a third of its height, so it functions as the single vertical anchor of a composition that is otherwise built from tilted planes and stepped balconies.

The buildings on either side are stacked out of flat knife strokes with no outlines. Balcony railings become rows of short parallel marks, shutters become small rectangles of ochre and red, and whole floors are suggested by a single loaded pull of the blade. A power line sags across the middle of the sky and ties the two sides together.

Down at street level the crowd arrives as pure colour. Orange, cadmium yellow, scarlet and cobalt are dabbed in short upright touches among the stalls, thickening toward the lower edge where the figures are largest. The road itself is left almost bare, a wide pale channel of white and grey running up the centre, and that emptiness is what lets the colour on either bank register. From our Vietnam collection, beside a greyer version of the same street with a cyclist in red and a rainy grey street beneath a named tower.