Woman in Golden Ao Dai Reaching for Blossoms from Behind — Print & Oil Painting

The flowers are attached to nothing. Four separate bursts of blossom occupy this canvas, one at each of her shoulders, one out at the left edge and the largest at the upper right, and not one of them has a stem, a branch, a vase or a bank of earth to grow from. They hang in the white like weather.

She is seen from behind and reaching. Her right arm is lifted toward the largest burst with the fingers open and very nearly touching it, and that arm supplies the only diagonal in a design otherwise made of a single standing vertical. Her head is a solid black mass of hair under a gold conical hat, and no part of the face or neck is shown.

The ao dai is a warm yellow gold, brushed in long vertical strokes that let the ground show through in places, with white side panels falling open from the hip and pale trousers below. A thin band of red and dark red is scraped along the very bottom of the hem, and it is the only warm dark in the lower half of the picture.

The white around all of this is not empty. It has been laid on with a knife into ridges, flats and torn edges that stand physically off the surface, and the flower bursts are built the same way: white impasto first, then quick touches of viridian, crimson, cobalt and yellow dropped in while it was still wet. Blossom and background share one substance, which is why the flowers seem to grow out of the wall rather than in front of it.

From our Vietnam collection, near a collage style figure in ao dai holding white blossoms and an ao dai woman holding lilies beside a clay jar.