Woman in a Red Wrap Seated Beside a Vase of Lotus Buds — Print & Oil Painting

The canvas is square and the arrangement inside it is a plain triangle. The shoulders make the apex, the folded legs run out to the left along the floor, and the vase closes the base at the right. Between those three points the room is completely empty.

One colour is allowed to be saturated. A scarlet halter tied behind the neck holds the centre of the picture, and after it the entire canvas falls back into grey, brown, olive and black. The red is painted thinly enough that the weave shows through it in places, which keeps it from sitting on top of the work like an applique.

Wall and floor are one continuous scrubbed grey brown with no skirting board, no corner and no horizon, separated only by a soft change of tone about a third of the way up. What tells us there is a floor at all is the shadow: a heavy dark pool spreading from beneath the figure and from beneath the vase, the darkest passage in the work.

She sits directly on the ground with the legs folded away to one side and one bare foot showing at the left. The head is bowed, the long black hair swings forward past one shoulder, and both hands are brought to the waistband of a dark green skirt in a small unhurried adjustment.

The vase is a squat earthenware jar with a wiped rim and a dull grey glaze, and out of it rises a tall open fan of lotus stems with broad ribbed leaves standing well above her head. From our Vietnam collection, near a woman in white ao dai resting her head on her hand by a vase and a woman in blue ao dai resting against a vase of lotus flowers.