Slumdog millionaire

This is a close up of the other Thanh Son picture. Nothing spooky that I've noticed in it so far. Instead it is perhaps a rather unappealing choice of subject - the dilapidated back streets, nay even slums of Hanoi - but the impressionistic rendering ameliorates that, and I find the colour combination of the yellows and blues very attractive, and something rather quirky about the lone television aerial.

Such was our indecision at the gallery about which picture to buy, we ended up buying both, and I am very pleased about that now, as they look well together, assisted in this strange marriage by being framed in the same gilded frames.

Slums and gilding, now that's juxtaposition.

Anatomy of a picture

These two oil paintings hang on the wall in our sitting room, and both are by the artist Thanh Son, who was born in Haiphong, Vietnam in 1982. He is a graduate of the Hanoi Industrial Fine Art College, and first exhibited in Hanoi in 1997, (at the tender age of 15). He may not yet be a name to conjure with, but we felt there was an immediate sense of talent when we spotted these pictures in a gallery in Hanoi in 2006. The canvases were removed from their stretchers and rolled to fit into a piece of hard plastic tubing for the journey back to Bangkok, where they then had to be placed on new stretchers and framed.

At first glance, the picture on the left (above) has a haunting quality, with an impressionistic view of a dimly lit street in Hanoi.

It was not for some months until we noticed a ghostly figure of the head of the Buddha, (above). The delay in its revelation created a sense that it had materialised subsequently.

Subsequently too we noticed the number "21" on the door, which had not be obvious before.

And finally, what had appeared to be the head, apparently wearing a traditional straw hat, is in fact only a round alcove in the wall.

The canvas measures one metre by one metre, so this might explain the initial lack of observance of these details. But the subsequent discoveries have made the picture the more enjoyable. And spooky!