Abstract Geometric Stilt Village Reflected in Golden Water — Print & Oil Painting

Without the two boats this would be an abstract painting. The upper right of the canvas is a dense mosaic of small rectangles in red, cobalt, cadmium yellow, white, viridian and black, packed edge to edge with dark lines scratched between them, and nothing in it is drawn as a wall, a roof or a window. It is pure block laying.

From the underside of that mosaic the same colours are pulled straight down. Long vertical drags run out of the village into the lower half of the picture, thinning and separating as they fall, and that single mechanical gesture is the whole of the reflection. The water is never painted as water; it is the village, dragged.

The left third is left almost empty. A soft field of cream, pale yellow and rose runs down from the top corner crossed by a few thin horizontal streaks, and it gives the eye somewhere to rest before it goes back into the noise. Below, the entire lower half settles into a warm gold.

Two small boats float in that gold at the lower left and the lower centre. Each is a long dark hull with a low arched shelter amidships painted in ochre and red, and each carries a standing figure in a conical hat working a pole, with a long thin spar running out at a shallow angle. One has a small blue bucket set at the bow.

They are tiny, and they are the only objects in the work with a describable shape. The moment the eye finds them the mosaic above stops being pattern and becomes a village on stilts, which is precisely the effect the composition is built to produce. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, near an abstract sunset in red over a floating village near Saigon and an abstract blue skyline in textured brushstrokes.