There are probably a thousand easy ways to make a painting of a landscape at night. A prompt typed into an AI image generator will produce a pretty decent one, complete with convincing brush strokes. One could sketch a scene in the daytime, adjusting the colours, "day-for-night", like countless Hollywood cinematographers. Or, easier still, take a photo as the light fades and replicate it later at leisure in a painting studio. However, when you've built an artistic practice around doing things the hard way, it can become, well, hard to accept any of these workarounds. Which is why, to complete the seemingly simple and poetic project of capturing a landscape at twilight, Jon turned not to AI or afternoon sketches or creative colour swaps or photography but to plein air oil painting, in the dark, in 20 below, beset by frostbite and coyotes and, as the weather warmed, inquisitive skunks, ticks, and whole herds of urban deer.
Other artists past and present, have stood in front of a darkening landscape and had to figure out their own way of addressing the many inherent problems of capturing the scene. But there are good reasons why Whistler made his famous nocturnes from the comfort of his studio, rather than outside in the darkness. Not the least of which is never having to worry about feeling his way back to the car when the work is done.
For the past 10 months, Jon has been leaving the house around sunset, which, depending on the season might be before or long after dinner. He has made his way to painting locations in patches of woods around Toronto, setting up his pared-down painting kit-a collapsible stool; black pochade box (like everything else, made the hard way-3D printed from his own design, iterated, perfected); black palette ready to go with neat beads of green, umber, navy, and grey; a clutch of brushes; a couple of panels primed in Payne's grey; a small flashlight to help him actually see. And then, as night rolls in, he has tried to paint the scene.
The timing is important. Night, on a planet with an atmosphere, doesn't come on all at once. Civil twilight starts the moment the sun passes below the horizon. The streetlights come on, Venus appears in the sky, but it's still bright enough to see. Nautical twilight, the 30 to 40 minutes captured, over and over, in these paintings, begins once the sun has moved six degrees below the horizon, and ends six degrees later, when, if you're out at sea, the water and the sky become the same colour and the horizon line vanishes, taking with it your anchor to the world. Jon works during the period of time when colours begin to meld together, crisp details give way to broad, amorphous shapes. Perspective becomes flattened; depth disappears. In the paintings this dissolution is rendered in washy brushstrokes. No impasto here, the marks stain just the surface, reminiscent of ink on a Japanese woodblock print. Documenting the fading light feels apt for this moment, an epoch shaped by endless crises, where the "new normal" is almost always darker than the "old normal." Whatever illumination that remains becomes more and more precious.
To document ephemeral lighting effects as they disappear, Jon has to work fast, getting the paint onto the board before his fingers seize up (in the winter) or the mosquitos suck him dry (in the summer). He chooses sites with little in the way of artificial light, a dot or two in the distance perhaps, but ideally nothing but ambient atmospheric light falling on the scene. To see his palette and panel, he has to periodically sweep them with the flashlight, but quickly; too much light and his eyes will adjust, and he'll be able to see his illuminated tools but not the scene he's using them to capture. If he's lucky, he gets two paintings done before time runs out; if he's very lucky, one in five will be good.
Jon's project, many months long and counting, is a marathon made of sprints. The panels are process paintings, indices of the race against time that produced them, a race against the dying light. It is an exercise in the Japanese concept "mono no aware" (物の哀れ): "the pathos of things," or "a sensitivity to ephemera." It is an acknowledgement of impermanence and of the melancholy of watching something transient, something fleeting disappear.
Even if the light is fading, there is still enough to lay down in paint. As in Ad Reinhardt's cross paintings, the nuances will make themselves apparent only after some slow looking; only after our eyes have adjusted and we accept the fading scenes. In this, the project becomes a gesture of "making do": with whatever photons are still whizzing around after the sun has set, with whatever tools you can maneuver in the darkness, with whatever time you have left. In the effort that goes into this making there is both optimism and resignation. As he packs up his kit, night after night, Jon is engulfed in shadows. He makes his way home through astronomical twilight, the last stage before true night begins. And then darkness; the stars alight, even in the city. As the evening's paintings dry in their (custom built, endlessly adjusted) rack, Jon sleeps. In the morning their scenes will appear again, that first, flat light, of nautical dawn.
