Grayscale Portrait of a Woman's Face Streaked by Rain — Print & Oil Painting

The hat is painted as a single black arc and it runs off both edges of the canvas. It has no crown, no visible weave and no thickness: just a wide shallow curve of near black filling the top corners and coming down to a point above the brow. Because it is cropped at both sides it reads as larger than the frame, and the face beneath it is enclosed rather than merely shaded.

From the underside of that brim the paint runs. Dozens of thin pale drips fall straight down from the black edge, over the forehead, down the cheeks, across the hair, over the background, some travelling the full height of the canvas. They are real runs in the medium, allowed to happen and left, and they read at the same time as rain coming off a hat and as the picture dissolving.

The face is the only carefully modelled thing here. The eyes are closed, the lids smooth and heavy, the brows dark and level, and the mouth is slightly parted with the lower lip catching a small highlight. It is modelled in warm greys and cool greys with almost no colour at all, and the light falls from directly in front, which flattens the cheekbones and leaves the sockets in shadow.

Two pale cords run from under the brim to the chin, crossing the neck at a shallow angle, and they are among the few clean unbroken lines in the picture. Below them the shoulders and hair go to solid black, and the whole lower left and lower right corners are lost entirely.

The background is flat pale grey with no incident. The measured saturation is the lowest of any figure in this group while the contrast is among the highest, which is the exact signature of black, white and a face between them. From our Vietnam collection, near an ao dai woman with her face shadowed by a conical hat and an anime close-up of a girl in a conical hat in the rain.