Fashion — watercolor painting by Ray Patrick
A mouth in close crop, lips parted on a row of teeth, set against a continuous ground of gold.
The lips sit low and to the right, cropped by three edges, so the gold ground occupies the upper left as an open diagonal. The line of the mouth runs corner to corner and carries the whole design.
Cerulean, teal and ultramarine through the lips against a flat metallic gold. Two colours and a metal, with no third note anywhere — the most reduced palette in this group.
Transparent blues flooded and allowed to separate, the darkest drawn in while the wash is live so the edges bloom rather than cut. The whites are reserved paper, not paint, and the teeth are lifted out rather than laid in.
Watercolour on paper over a gold-leaf ground. The leaf is laid first and the washes worked against it, which is why the blue stops at a hard edge where it meets the metal.
No signature visible within the painted area.