Rainy Water Village With a Boat Passing Through — Print & Oil Painting

Blue does everything here that darkness normally does. The village is set into a deep blue black mass filling both sides of the tall canvas, and the roofs sit on top of it as pale wedges of yellow green and cream, layered so thickly and at so many angles that they read almost as foliage. It takes a moment to see them as buildings at all.

Straight up the middle runs a channel of water, pale blue and nearly white, widening as it comes forward and burning out completely near the top where a vertical shaft of light drops into it. That channel is the only calm passage on the canvas, and it splits the packed village into two banks.

Rain crosses the lot. Long white strokes have been scraped down the full height of the picture at a slight tilt, over roofs, water and boats without distinction, more in the manner of varnishing a surface than of painting an object. They are what unifies two halves otherwise built from completely different marks.

Two long narrow boats sit on the open water at the centre right, low in the frame, each holding several small figures. Those figures, and a scatter of others among the houses, are put down as tiny dabs of orange, scarlet and lime no bigger than a knife tip, and they carry the only warm colour in a canvas of blue and yellow green. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, alongside a rowboat passing stilt houses under a quiet grey sky and flower sellers beside a canal lined with autumn roofs.