Yellow and Blue Ao Dai Women Under a Pink Umbrella — Print & Oil Painting

Two colours are set against each other and a third is placed above them. The woman on the left wears a deep mustard yellow ao dai, the one on the right a clear turquoise blue, and over both of them an umbrella opens in a strong pink. Nothing else in the painting carries any colour at all, so those three notes have the canvas entirely to themselves.

Everything around them has been reduced to a soft brown grey fog. There is a suggestion of a far bank, possibly a tower, certainly a horizon, but every edge has been rubbed away and the paint is scumbled so thinly that the weave shows through. No architecture is provided, no ground plane and no sky, only weather.

The pair walk directly away from us, side by side and in step, their white trousers merging into the pale wet road below the knee. The one in yellow carries a green bag at her hip and holds the umbrella handle up and across; the one in blue, hair tied back in a short ponytail, carries something pink in her right hand. Neither face is shown and neither needs to be.

Depth arrives through a single small device. Far off to the right a third figure under a white umbrella is set down at a fraction of the size and at almost the same value as the fog, and that one mark turns a flat grey field into a street with distance in it. Below the walkers the wet ground breaks into short black horizontal strokes carrying their reflections. Part of our Vietnam collection, alongside two women in red walking under a blue umbrella and umbrellas crossing a rainy street beneath pink blossoms.