Boats Gathered Beneath Colorful Roofs on a Golden Canal — Print & Oil Painting

Everything in this canvas is built from slabs except the flowers. Roofs, walls, foliage and sky are laid on in broad loaded pulls of the knife, some the width of a hand, and the marks stay separate: a gold roof is four or five strokes, a wall is two, the sky a dozen. Then the lower third arrives and the scale collapses. Across the pale green water dozens of small pink and magenta dots have been touched in with the point of the blade, none bigger than a fingernail, and the jump from the widest mark in the picture to the narrowest is the strongest effect it has.

The village sits on the bank in a stack. Thatch and corrugated sheet in chrome yellow, ochre and olive make the roofs; below them the walls are white, blue and rust, jammed together with no gap between; above them the trees rise in dark green and viridian against a blue grey sky worked in the same wide strokes.

The boats form the seam between the two halves. Six or seven long narrow hulls lie prow to stern along the middle, black outlined, each carrying figures in white, rose and red under pale conical hats, and their poles cross the group as thin diagonals. One boat at the right sits apart with a single figure in orange aboard.

Below the hulls the water takes the whole village back in broken form, greened and streaked sideways, with the gold of the roofs surviving as one warm smear near the centre. The canal itself is green rather than the gold the title names, and the difference is worth noticing, because every gold passage in this painting is up in the roofs. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, near a canal market crowded with boats under warm golden light and a fisher village left to dissolve into golden morning haze.