Venice reflections

Warm yellow and orange palazzo facades line a narrow canal, their balconies and arched windows reflected in dark blue-violet water alongside a moored gondola. Superimposed over this view, as if in a double exposure, floats the translucent face of a woman in an ornate gold Venetian carnival mask, her gilded costume and headdress spreading across the lower half of the canvas.

Cool blues and violets of the water contrast with the honeyed ochres of the buildings, while gold filigree patterns model the mask and costume in delicate, layered strokes. Soft edges and overlapping transparent planes blur architecture and figure into one another, built with loose, blended brushwork that gives the whole scene a hazy, spectral, theatrical mood.