Two Women in Red Walking Under a Blue Umbrella — Print & Oil Painting

The colour logic has been inverted here. In most paintings of this kind the ao dai is white and the street is dark. Here the street is a broad field of pale grey, silver and chalky blue, knifed on in overlapping slabs, and the two figures are the darkest and hottest thing in the frame: scarlet and vermilion tunics that read almost as a wound in all that cool paint.

Both women are walking away from us and neither face is shown. The left one carries something yellow and something small and blue at her hip, and the long yellow lining of her dress swings out behind her leg. The right one holds a pale blue umbrella whose canopy is the one soft curved shape in a picture made of straight edges, and its ribs run out in fine dark lines that repeat the angle of her arm.

Below their feet the ground turns to a scatter of hard black and slate marks, longer and more broken than the strokes above, and those marks are doing two jobs at once: they are the wet reflection of the two figures and they are the anchor that keeps the pair from floating in the grey. Without them the composition would have no ground at all.

Behind and above, the artist has hinted at a city, a roofline here, a window there, a second umbrella further off, but nothing is allowed to resolve. The background stays half a step from abstraction so that the red keeps its force. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, near umbrellas crossing a rainy street beneath pink blossoms and women in ao dai passing flower sellers on a rainy street.