Sunlit Street Corner by an Old Colonial House — Print & Oil Painting

The pavement is as much the subject as the buildings are. A broad sweep of ochre and gold takes the entire lower third and runs unbroken from the left edge to the right, painted in long horizontal strokes with white scumbled across them, and it is bright enough to throw light back up into the shaded shopfronts above.

At the centre stands the old house the title names: two storeys under a red tiled roof, its ochre wall carrying tall shuttered openings and a small painted sign. The tiles are laid in with short parallel touches of terracotta and rust, and the eaves overhang far enough to put the whole ground floor into shadow. A row of shopfronts recedes to its left beneath striped blue and yellow awnings.

A tree occupies the right third and behaves quite differently from the architecture. Its foliage is dabbed on in two greens and a strong chrome yellow, loosely enough for the pale sky to show through in dozens of gaps, while the trunk and lower limbs are dark and firmly drawn. It leans over the corner and softens the whole right side of a picture otherwise made of straight lines.

Utility poles and a tangle of wires cross the upper left, with a thin cool blue sky and white cloud between them. Down on the corner a small group has gathered around bicycles loaded with orange and red blossom, petals dropped across the gold ground beside them, and a cyclo with a blue clad driver crosses the open pavement at the right. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, alongside a flower cart beside a weathered wall with a green shutter and an old street pavement reflecting a golden autumn tree.