Branch of Red Blossoms in Ink and Watercolor Style — Print & Oil Painting

The paper does half the work. A pale cream ground holds the upper left and the centre of the sheet with nothing on it at all, warming to a dull olive gold along the right edge and the bottom, and every branch has been placed so that the emptiness reads as air rather than as unpainted space.

The trunk enters at the lower left and climbs toward the upper left corner, and it is the only element given any modelling. Its bark is drawn with a firm dark outline and filled with dry brown and grey strokes running lengthwise, with two dark hollows worked into it where old limbs have broken away.

From it the branches spread in thin nervous lines, forking repeatedly and tapering to hair fine tips, fanning out to the right and upward so that the composition opens like a hand. A second trunk rises at the bottom centre and a third group of branches enters low at the right edge.

The blossom is the entire colour scheme. Hundreds of small red flowers are massed along the branches, some in clusters dense enough to read as one solid patch and some scattered singly, each given a few pale flecks at the centre for the stamens. Where they crowd the red deepens almost to crimson; at the edge of a cluster single flowers stand clear against the cream.

No figure, no ground line, no vase and no horizon appear anywhere in the sheet. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, near koi fish swimming beneath yellow apricot blossoms and a woman in silver ao dai beneath red blossoms on gold leaf.