5/18/2023 0 Comments Painter of the night batoFollowing a painting session, Riepenhoff can’t be sure what he created, quite literally, in the dark it’s only in the morning daylight that he really encounters his artwork for the first time.Īnn Craven invokes a similarly quirky process with the moon paintings she’s been making since 1996. “It’s more about my relationship with the night sky,” he said. Yet the brushy abstractions are more like markers of Riepenhoff’s immediate movements than of accurate depictions of a particular place and time. The works, whose titles often include the names of these disparate locales, become autobiographical records of his itinerant life. Riepenhoff often uses just a small lantern to illuminate his pigments and canvases as he stands outside in the northern woods of Wisconsin, Puerto Rico, Japan, or the Isle of Eigg. Since 2009, he’s used a plein air technique to depict the night sky wherever in the world he visits. Milwaukee-based Riepenhoff adopts a loose, uninhibited approach to the nocturne and takes it a step further: He actually paints in the dark. Mara De Luca, Michal Rovner, Vija Celmins, Ann Craven, and John Riepenhoff use night scenes to thematize fear and current events while engaging new, unique painting processes. The title likens Matisse’s spontaneous artistic decisions to the improvisations of a drummer or saxophonist in a smoky club.Ĭontemporary painters and filmmakers who engage with the topic immediately situate themselves within a long lineage of creative predecessors, yet the material still offers seemingly endless generative possibilities. The artist included the work-which features a black figure falling against a deep blue, starry sky-in his book called Jazz. Over 50 years later, one of Henri Matisse’s most famous cut-paper collages, Icarus (1947), offered a modernist connection between the nocturne and the aural realm. The dreamy composition islouder and more symphonic than Whistler’s quiet scenes. In thick blue and yellow swirls over a half-invented town, Van Gogh rendered the clouds, stars, and moon. Just over a decade later, Vincent van Gogh created perhaps the world’s most recognizable nocturne, Starry Night (1889). ![]() By employing the same term for visual art, Leland suggested an underlying lyricism in Whistler’s scenes. Leyland was an amateur pianist, already familiar with musical “nocturnes”-Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Frédéric Chopin, and Felix Mendelssohn all created classical compositions inspired by, or meant to be played during, the evening. ![]() In 1871, the artist created the first of many canvases depicting the Thames River soft and tranquil in the moonlight. These complex diagrams helped ancient people prepare for the elements and animal migrations, long before iPhones offered instant atmospheric updates.Īrt critics often describe more recent after-dusk paintings as “nocturnes.” The term derives from Frederick Leyland, a patron of American painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Cave artists in France and Germany depicted constellations, the moon, and seasonal changes. According to NASA, humans began creating lunar calendars around 32,000 BC. In contrast, the oldest visual representations of nighttime were utilitarian. Romantic-era poet Lord Byron used the evening to epitomize beauty, while modernist Dylan Thomas employed it as a metaphor for death. Rich in mystery and symbolic potential, the nighttime has long inspired artists of all disciplines to consider darkness, the cosmos, and the unknown.
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