Twilight Came

“Twilight Came” is the title of a painting I completed in the thick of this last winter’s storms. I started the painting with the image of our darkening house in the late afternoon with the palm tree behind it. I liked the utter darkness of the house in the stormy late day, with the windows still shimmering with the dying sun amid clouds.

I worked on the painting until I thought I was finished with it. But then I realized I was not drawn to what I had painted. No emotional strings reeled me in to the image. Sometimes I have a feeling of remembrance as surefooted as fragrance when I paint. But there was no nostalgia that I could smell as the darkness crept forward on this canvas. Sometimes when painting, I can even sense a movement like the wind touching my skin. There are always other senses besides sight lurking in my subconsciousness that make a painting rich in meaning for me.

So I spent several days without touching the painting, neither ignoring it nor painting on it. I was waiting to see what would happen. Finally, I gingerly painted the suggestion, the hint of a figure, in the left-hand window behind the drapes. “Ah . . .” I said to myself “that was what was needed.” The action wasn’t premeditated or thought consciously about. It was a slight gesture of brush and hand that hinted in the smallest way that there might be a human in the room. Whether anyone else might resonate with this image is unimportant to me. What is important to me at this stage is that in the world of this painting, the painting feels completed and open at the same time.

Something will happen in the painting, although we don’t know what.

I am not solely interested in painting what I see; I am interested in painting the realities that lie in wait behind what I see. I am painting the feeling state that is rife with the subtle streams of breath; the hallmark of life itself.

“Twilight Came” is a perfect title for this little painting. Twilight becomes a sentient being, with its own volition. It is a surprising visitor, even though we know it well. It has many disguises, camouflaged subtly in robes of night, or even invisibly cloaked in fog from the sea. Twilight is often soft-spoken, gently rounding the forms that blare at noon. It is polite, yet filled with poetry, suggestive, and lingering.

Often when I paint, I have an illusion that reason will have the high ground to the hand, conspiring to make sense. I trust it to guide my highest artistic interests. But truthfully, this is not so. What really guides me is best looked out of the side of my peripheral vision. I must wait until the images come silently through the side gate or the backwoods and to have patience to see how they become a reality in the painting. Because inspiration comes in its own time, coming together, becoming. This then is how the painting arrives and this is how “Twilight Came.”