Woman in a Ruffled Skirt Amid Pink and Blue Strokes — Print & Oil Painting

This is a picture about relief. The paint stands off the canvas everywhere except on the figure, applied in slabs with a blade and left with ridges that hold their own cast shadow, so raking light would change the image before the colour did.

The wide ruffle at the hip is the largest of those passages. It is built from grey, black, olive and white pushed outward in flaring wedges, each one a single pass of the knife with a white ridge along its trailing edge, and it opens around the waist like a collar dropped to the wrong place. Nothing about it is described as fabric. It is described as material.

At the upper left a burst of rose, cobalt, violet and white spreads across a third of the canvas in the same technique, flaring outward from behind the shoulder. It could be blossom, it could be plumage, and the artist gives no clue either way.

Against all that, the back is the one smoothly painted thing in the work. It is modelled in quiet warm pinks with the strokes blended out, the hair is pinned into a small dark twist, and both arms are raised to the head with one of them carrying a long dark smear from shoulder to wrist. The calm of that passage is what the rest of the surface is measured against.

The ground is a pale warm grey with thin runs of diluted paint travelling down it, and the readings give low saturation at a middling brightness, which is the honest arithmetic of greys and creams with two loud corners set into them. From our Vietnam collection. For the same blade turned on a city instead of a figure, see an abstract blue skyline in textured brushstrokes; its closest relative in this group is a woman lifting her hair above a falling white sheet.