Woman Lifting Her Hair Above a Falling White Sheet — Print & Oil Painting

Everything behind the figure has been broken into separate tiles. Gold, ochre, turquoise, violet and dull crimson chips are laid edge to edge across the whole background, each one a single press of the blade, and not one of them is blended into its neighbour. The wall behaves like mosaic rather than like air.

A white sheet falls from both shoulders and opens outward like two panels held apart. It is not white paint: it is white, cream, pale green and cold blue run in long parallel ribs, and those ribs are the only strokes in the picture that travel any distance without breaking.

Her back is turned, the head bent away to the left, both hands carried up into the hair, one at the crown and one out at the far shoulder. That back is the second continuous passage in the work, modelled in warm orange and rose that carry into violet and navy where the form turns away, so the shadow side is built from colour rather than from brown.

The gold of the background is concentrated behind the head and thins toward the corners, which gives the standing figure a halo without the painter ever drawing one. Small notes of scarlet and blue sit in the upper corners where the tiles change temperature.

Contrast and saturation both read high here, and that follows straight from a technique which never lets two colours meet. Part of our Vietnam collection, near a woman in a ruffled skirt amid pink and blue strokes.