Nighttime Scenes
Night Drawings
These nighttime scenes are an exercise in making the eyes work. In The World According to Color, James Fox writes: “Our vision in bright conditions is too precise… but scotopic vision demands we complete the picture for ourselves. In doing so darkness necessitates an unusually industrious mode of looking: interrogative, problem-solving, self-reflexive. In darkness, we see ourselves seeing.” The brain takes in what details it can from our eyes, but relies on prior knowledge and learned expectations to fully construct a visual. Although I am continuing to use photographic references for these night time drawings, I am allowing for purposeful ambiguity in my rendering. I am trying to recreate that experience of eyes seeing in darkness, to foster interpretation by the viewer, who will decipher and fill in, knowingly or not, using imagery pulled from their own minds.
