This summer, I’ve found myself working unexpectedly in the genre of nocturnes – paintings set at night. The first painting below started as a work set in the afternoon. After working on it for a month straight in February, I put it aside. It wasn’t gelling. When I started working on it again in June, I repainted it as a nocturne and somehow it worked. I had never painted a nocturne and thus there was something of a learning curve. Nailing values is really tricky. The resulting painting – Gardening at Night – came very slowly, but I’m pleased with the results.
The next Nocturne painting I did is called The Rupture. I finished it earlier this month. Last year, I found this still from a security camera of a guy watching an oil refinery explosion in Texas. Something about the composition, the flag, the half-naked guy spoke to me. So I decided to paint this using the techniques I discovered with the last painting.
