Woman with Red Blossoms Between Scarlet and White — Print & Oil Painting

Two territories of colour split the surface vertically, more or less at its centre. The left half is scarlet, laid on flat in some places and scraped back to the weave in others. The right half is white and cream, worked into thick ridges. The figure stands exactly on the seam between them, turned away from us, and belongs to neither side.

A cluster of red petals is fixed in the hair above the ear, put down with the blade in five or six loaded touches and never resolved into a flower. It is the sharpest concentration of colour above the shoulders and it ties the head to the red field behind it.

One arm reaches away to the right, past the edge of the white cloth, and the fingers arrive at a small knot of blue and white pigment sitting on the pale ground. Nothing identifies it. Its job in the design is to give the outstretched arm a destination and to answer the red with the one cool accent in the work.

Below the waist the same scarlet returns as a drape gathered round the hips, so the red occupies the top left and the bottom left of the canvas and the eye travels diagonally between the two. The head is bent forward and the face is given in a shadowed profile with almost no drawing in it.

The paint stands high off the surface throughout, and where the knife has lifted away it has left clean flat facets with hard edges. Part of our Vietnam collection. The same red bloom is worn at the ear in a close up portrait with a red flower behind her ear, and the same weight of drapery, in gold rather than white, carries a woman draped in a crimson and gold wrap.