Around the 1960s, painter Nguyen Huyen had a field trip to Mai Chau, Hoa Binh. With a rich source of sketch material on a variety of topics, he used that saved vivid realistic image in later paintings of lacquer, silk, oil… Nguyen Huyen is an artist who loves beautiful moments. He portrayed the image of a young Muong ethnic girl in Mai Chau in many rich activities such as in stilt house, by the fire, spinning, weaving… very charming and feminine. These paintings all evoke beautiful emotions about flexible shapes, soft contours. Lacquer material with deep colors of the basic black, vermilion, and mother of pearl white palette was still very technically used by Nguyen Huyen, skillfully, reasonably with bold, light, large and small strokes, dividing the shapes according to the lines that describe figure, clothes, things.
The painting ‘A young woman of Muong in Mai Chau’ is not outside of the typical basic character shaping system of Nguyen Huyen. We see again the roundness of the shape, the contours that he used the tip of a brush to create a dark and light border with gold leaves. The areas that needed light, he sanded down more, but not according to a specific level of light, some areas are lighter then some areas are darker. For the color patches need to be sanded, he used the impulse of his hand to create shapes on surface of the painting. He did not use brush strokes to make light and dark, but used a color and then sanded it lightly or hard to create light and dark.
