Two Women in Ao Dai with a Flower-Basket Bicycle in the Mist — Print & Oil Painting

One rectangle of blue is the only colour in this painting. A folder held against the hip of the right hand woman, teal and clean edged, sits almost at the centre of the canvas, and the measurement puts the saturation of the whole surface at very close to nothing. Everything else is white, cream, pearl grey and the palest warm brown.

The paint is thick where the figures are and thin where the world is. Both dresses are built up with a knife into ridged white slabs that catch real light along their edges, while the trees, the road and the air behind them are scrubbed on flat and left half dissolved. The women stand physically raised off a background that is barely there.

Their faces have been taken away. Each wears a white conical hat drawn as a hard triangle, and beneath the brim there is no feature at all, only a pale blank with two heavy falls of dark hair on either side of it. The refusal is identical on both figures.

The bicycle is reduced to line. Two thin white ellipses for the wheels, a bar, a fork and a pair of handlebars, drawn over the surface rather than modelled into it, and at the front a white basket packed with white blooms and green leaves. The woman on the left holds the bars in both hands.

The ground is wet and pale, scattered with small fallen leaves that thin as they recede, and a faint reflection sits beneath each pair of dark blue shoes. Overhead a large tree spreads in cream and buff against a white sky and dissolves completely at the top edge. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, near two ao dai women cycling with a basket of violet flowers and ao dai students walking through a misty grey haze.