On Painting the Night Without Black

When the sun goes down I do not reach for black. I have learned that the night is not an absence of colour but a different arrangement of it: cobalt and ultramarine, a violet that borders on green, the deep prussian where the sky meets the roofs.

A single light changes everything. A cafe lantern, a star, a window left burning. Around it the dark organises itself, warm against cool, and the eye is led from one small fire to the next. I paint the gaps between the lights as carefully as the lights themselves.

People ask why I exaggerate the colour. I do not think I exaggerate it. I feel it more than I see it, and I would rather be true to the feeling than to the dull grey a photograph would give you. The night, properly looked at, is the most coloured hour of the day.

So I work quickly, while the impression is still warm, and I forgive myself the parts that are clumsy. A canvas made in a single sitting keeps something a careful one loses. The night will not wait, and neither, in the end, will the painter.