Four Women in Ao Dai Cycling Through a Green Bamboo Lane — Print & Oil Painting

The road is empty and it takes the entire bottom third. A wide band of flat grey, brushed smooth with a few paler drags across it, runs from edge to edge with nothing on it but the shadows of the bicycles, and that emptiness is what gives the four riders room to be read one at a time.

Behind them the green closes like a wall. Bamboo and broadleaf foliage is built from thousands of short strokes in sap, emerald, olive and near black, packed tight enough to admit no distance at all, with pale trunks rising through it and small white and pink blossoms flecked across the lower half. Only at the top left does a patch of white sky break in.

The bicycles have been drawn properly. Frames, forks, chain guards, wire and black baskets, and complete wheels with the spokes visible on all four machines: the artist has refused the usual shortcut of leaving a rim as an open ellipse. They are heavy, upright, old fashioned bicycles and they sit convincingly on the road.

The riders are in white ao dai and conical hats, spaced unevenly across the width so the group reads as travelling rather than parading. The second from the left is the largest and the most upright, her dress falling in long unbroken panels almost to the pedals; the others are turned at different angles, one nearly in profile, one three quarters away.

An ochre verge runs between the road and the foliage, warm against all that green, and it is the only place where the two halves of the picture are allowed to meet. From our Vietnam collection, near four women in ao dai standing with bicycles under palm trees and ao dai students walking beneath a green tree canopy.