Fashion — watercolor painting by Ray Patrick
A mouth, close enough to fill the sheet, lips parted and the teeth caught as a band of gold across the opening.
Cropped hard on all four sides so the lips run edge to edge, with the dark line between them placed almost exactly across the middle. Nothing establishes a face; the mouth is the whole subject and the scale is deliberately uncertain.
Crimson, madder and oxblood through the lips, with cobalt and violet in the shadow between them. Around it the paper is left in cool greys and blues. The gold is the only metal and it sits where the light would.
Wet-in-wet throughout: the reds are flooded and allowed to granulate and pool, with darker pigment drawn into the still-wet wash. The gold is laid afterwards as leaf, broken and irregular, catching the paper's grain rather than following a drawn edge.
Watercolour on paper with gold leaf. Transparent throughout, the paper reading through every passage and doing the work of the lights. The leaf is the only opaque material on the sheet.
No signature visible within the painted area.