Abstract Peach-Toned Reflection of a Single Boat at Sunset — Print & Oil Painting

Every edge in this painting is soft except one. A single straight horizontal runs the full width just above the middle, thin, dark and quite sharp, and it is the only decisive mark on the surface. Above and below it nothing has a boundary: the trees are stippled, the water is dragged, the light is blown out at the left into pale blue white, and no two areas meet along a line.

The mass at the upper right is made entirely of small separate touches. Rust, copper, terracotta and cream have been dabbed on in thousands of points, dense at the centre of the crown and thinning outward until the ground shows through, and the same treatment runs left along the horizon at a much smaller scale, where it reads as distance rather than as foliage.

Below the line the whole thing returns, but changed. The reflection has been dragged straight down in long strokes that smear the stipple into streaks, and it comes out paler and warmer than the trees themselves, running to peach and pale blue by the bottom of the canvas. Cover the top half and what is left is a colour field with no subject in it.

One object floats on the right. A small boat, empty, drawn as two thin curved slivers of cream and shadow, sitting exactly on the reflection with nothing near it for the whole width of the canvas. It is the only closed shape in the work, and it is small enough that the eye takes a moment to find it, which is precisely what gives the water its scale. Part of our Vietnam collection, alongside a lone fisherman poling a sampan across a misty golden river and an impressionist river sunset with a rowing silhouette.