2020-22 Twilight Series
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I started the Twilight Series in April 2020. Before then, as a painter who aims to capture the phenomena of landscape, I would travel to places which were unusual to my eye and tried to capture them, such as Big Sur, Yellowstone and Death Valley. When we all started staying home in 2020, our radius shrank and everything around us became closer. I decided to pull from my immediate surroundings. The world had slowed down, which gave me time to look at what was right in front of me. By looking at the hills around me at a certain time of day, shortly after the sun had set, I found endless variations in the color and movement of the sky above and the twinkling city lights below. To bring those elements together, I introduced the horizontal color bands which get thinner towards the horizon, into the sky. They bring the reflected color of the city into the night sky as well as creating geometrical markers of perspective which convey distance and perspectival depth. In some of the paintings, the Downtown LA skyline appears almost as a mirage. It is beyond the hills, showing that even this was farther than my immediate radius. The hills around me, with their solitary houses conveys a sense of solitude even amongst the other lights, but they also have a feeling of comfort in that we’re not alone.
With each series I like to challenge myself on a painterly level. In traditional landscape painting, atmospheric perspective is when things in the distance appear bluer than the foreground. This doesn’t apply to the night sky, so I had to investigate what that looks like at night. I work from photos, but there is a lot of looking at the real thing involved. I take color notes and bring those into the paintings.
This series relates to my previous work in that I have always been interested in capturing the phenomena of landscape and my surroundings. It started with urban interior spaces in Berlin, and shifted to the Los Angeles night sky when I first moved here in 2004. Then it took on forms of clouds and aerial perspectives, abstract movements, and then onto universal geometric forms. With this series I revisited the night sky and lights while bringing in the elements of the geometric color bands to emphasize the strength of painting, in relation observed color and forms.