Vietnamese Fisherman print

“In early 2025, I had the pleasure of travelling through Vietnam. I spent a lot of time exploring the waterways, trying incredible food and people-watching in the intense heat. During my trip, I also made time to visit an art gallery, where I fell in love with a unique style of Vietnamese lacquer painting called sơn mài.

“To create this distinctive style, artists build up layers of different materials before removing the topmost layer to reveal the colours and textures beneath. In this case, eggshells were used to create a beautiful, tactile surface; however, I also saw stunning variations using gold leaf, silver leaf and mother-of-pearl.

“This experience stayed with me long after I left Vietnam, and I wanted to create a painting that captured the feeling of my time there. I painted a fisherman surrounded by four leaping fish as a nod to Vietnam’s four sacred creatures: the Dragon, the Unicorn, the Tortoise and the Phoenix.

“I incorporated sơn mài into some of the fish, using the technique I had discovered during my travels. I then finished the painting with the distinctive Vietnamese diacritic marks around the ‘O’ in Hội An.

“I felt it was important to work from reference photographs I had taken while I was there, particularly the rich blue tones of the sky and boats. Going back through my photographs allowed me to choose the images that best captured the atmosphere I remembered, while exploring the connection between place, memory and imagination.”