provides a treasure trove of practical techniques and ingenious approaches. In this captivating guide, noted artist
Jane Freeman shows readers, step by step, how to use modified kit components, and found and handmade objects to create intensely detailed miniature constructions.
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February 5, 2008
Late Light into Night, in Chelsea
"The long hotel, acutely white,Against the after-sunset light..."
--Arthur Symons, Color Studies, 1895: "At Dieppe"
So many painters of landscapes cite in catalog essays a bare and fundamental “interest in light.” That’s like a physician claiming interest in anatomy. That is making Lite of Light.
Hopper painted light in an original way and also said original things about it, like how street lamps at dusk turn city into stageset. Frank O’Hara wrote of the pleasure of neon in daylight and of light bulbs in daylight. It is a cliche even to say the subject of light never should become clichéd since light is always different, from one experience to the next.
Late today I was walking in Chelsea just before the light began to dwindle. An unexpected hush in the street intensified the pre-dusk drama. No one was about, not even any traffic. I went west on 23rd Street, toward Eleventh Avenue. The sky was lucent blue, an eggshell. It was both strong and fragile -- dominant in intensity and fugitive on the verge of change. It occurred to me that dawn and dusk, like childhood and extreme age, signify transition, while day and night, like maturity and death, seem relatively fixed, or at least steady or prolonged.
I came to a long, low warehouse with a stepped façade and bricked-up windows. It could have been painted by the precisionist Sheeler, the way it stood flat against the sky. It looked alien, detached, desolate – a cityscape by Ault. The painted lower half popped white in the incipient dusk. In mid-distance, beyond the warehouse, a peaked water tower barrel looked like a paper cutout, backlit. A tree silhouette etched itself into the radiant sky, all the countless complex twig ends sparking with flinty energy. This was rare, sere beauty. A mystery.
I watched the sky darken in imperceptible grades. Turning back, I walked north along Tenth Avenue, still alone in my lull as the sky finished steeping. When night claimed its check upon the day, the traffic started up with honk and shout. A filling station leaked fluorescent firelight. From some dark alcove drifted a whiff of clove from someone's kretek cigarette.
Posted by Jane on February 5, 2008 10:07 PM
