Two Ao Dai Women Cycling With a Basket of Violet Flowers — Print & Oil Painting

Nearly the entire surface has been laid down with a knife in short vertical drags of white, pearl grey and bone, over a darker underpainting that keeps breaking through in thin interrupted lines. It could be a wall, or a street in bad weather, or simply weather itself. Nothing in it is named. It is a field of texture with two figures set into it.

Against all that thickness the bicycle is drawn rather than painted. Wheels, forks and handlebars are one dark line of almost constant width, laid over the impasto instead of built out of it, and both rims are left as open ellipses with no spokes inside them. The contrast between that thin certain line and the loaded paint around it is the most deliberate decision in the picture.

Two women share the frame. The one at the front is turned away, a hand out on the bar, her face lost completely under the brim of a wide conical hat in pale straw gold. The second sits close behind her and is the only face granted: a cheek, a closed mouth, a lowered eye, with a heavy dark braid falling to the waist and an ochre ribbon worked through it. Both wear long white ao dai whose panels dissolve into loose strokes below the knee.

One thing here is allowed colour. A bundle of violet flowers fills the basket at the front, worked in small blunt dabs of lilac and lavender that stand proud of the surface. The measured saturation across the canvas is very low, which confirms what the eye already reports: this is a grey painting with a single purple event in it. Part of our Vietnam collection, and a close relative of two women in ao dai beside a flower basket bicycle in the mist and bicycle vendors carrying yellow and red flowers.