On Painting at Night

I began painting at night by accident — a deadline, a restless afternoon that bled into evening, the realisation that the light had changed in ways I found unexpectedly useful. That was five years ago. Now most of my serious work happens after ten.

There's a practical dimension to this. Artificial light is consistent in a way that natural light isn't; I can work for six hours without the quality of illumination shifting beneath my brushes. But the practical explanation doesn't fully account for it. Something else happens in the studio at night.

The ordinary sounds of the day disappear. Without those peripheral distractions, attention narrows and deepens. I find I notice more: the way a colour leans warm against its neighbour, the small decisions that accumulate into a painting's mood. Paintings made at night have a particular quality of having been looked at rather than merely executed.

There is also something about darkness as subject matter. The paintings I'm drawn to — Rembrandt's late work, Hammershøi's interiors, Morandi's evening still lifes — take darkness seriously as a visual element rather than an absence of light. Night teaches you that darkness has colour; that shadow is not simply the negation of brightness but a presence in its own right, with its own temperatures and textures.

I'd encourage any painter who hasn't tried nocturnal work to experiment with it. The first night in the studio after dark feels strange, even slightly illicit. By the third, you may wonder why you ever worked any other way.