Neon-Lit Night Street Bustling With Shoppers — Print & Oil Painting

The street is a canyon and the viewpoint has been kept low inside it. Buildings climb both sides to the top edge in grey, lavender and cold violet, tilting inward, their upper floors lost in shadow, and the only sky is a wedge of blue black far back at the vanishing point. Nothing up there is lit.

All the light in this picture is made at ground level and all of it is yellow. It pours out of an arcade along the left, from a run of stalls down the right, and from strings of small lamps overhead, and where it strikes the wet road it repeats as long vertical smears reaching almost to the bottom edge. The upper two thirds of the canvas are cold and the lower third is hot.

In between, the crowd is handled as a band of noise. At middle distance the figures dissolve into short strokes of teal, white and grey with no separation between them, and only their number registers. Wires cross the gap above their heads and catch the light along their undersides.

Four figures at the front are given weight: two women in blue and one in a white top walking toward the viewer at the lower left, with a small child beside them at the very edge, and a vendor in orange carrying a shoulder pole hung with green baskets straight down the middle of the road. Over at the right a food cart with steel pots stands beside two people seated on stools. Broad white stripes of a crossing run along the bottom edge and cut the picture off cleanly. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, near a vendor at a golden lit street corner at dusk and cyclists riding through a misty blue village at night.