Golden Sunset Glow Over Empty Boats Beneath an Autumn Tree — Print & Oil Painting

The houses are standing on a thicket. Beneath the whole cluster runs a dense mass of thin dark poles, dozens of them, in no order and not all of them vertical, and they occupy as much of the canvas as the buildings above. Where they meet the water the painter has carried them straight on downward in the reflection, softer and wavering, so the village appears to sit inside its own supports rather than on top of them.

Above the poles the roofs hold the strongest structural colour in the work. Corrugated sheet in cobalt, viridian, chrome orange and pale grey is pitched at a dozen different angles, no two roofs level with one another, with black lines drawn along the ridges and down the seams. The walls below are bare board, scratched through to a paler layer.

One bare tree rises out of the cluster at the right and spreads across the top of the picture. Its trunk is dark and its branches are drawn as fine forked lines, while the leaves arrive as a broad haze of orange and scarlet that stops short of covering the twigs, so the drawing of the tree stays visible through its own foliage.

The sky is worked in yellow and gold with cloud put down as round soft discs, and the same discs come back in the water below. Two covered boats float in the foreground, each with a woven arched canopy and a slim black hull, and each moored to a thin pole whose reflection wriggles down through the gold as a wavy line. Nobody is at the oars, though a small red mark sits at the stern of the nearer boat. From our Vietnam collection, beside a pale grey water village with a single rowing boat far out and a floating village whose roofs sit in a fiery orange sunset.