Carol Becker on Susanna Coffey’s Night Paintings, published in conjunction with the hardcover book “Night Paintings”
July 15, 2019
Carol Becker
Night Painting
At present I absolutely want to paint a starry sky. It often seems to me that night is still more richly colored than the day….If only you pay attention to it you will see that certain stars are lemon-yellow, others pink or a green, blue and forget-me-not brilliance….It is obvious that putting little white dots on the blue-black is not enough to paint a starry sky.
(Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Wilhelmina van Gogh, 16 September, 1888)
Humans are not well adapted to the night. Owls, possums, coyotes, bats, leopards, lemurs, beavers, badgers, skunks, red foxes, wombats, among other mammals, have sensorial adaptations that make them most comfortable, even enlivened, by the dark. They might sleep all day, but they anticipate the night. Some have echolocation (bio sonar) and experience the world sonically, bouncing back to them. Others have eyes that pierce the darkness like lasers. Many are hunters—it makes sense to hunt when prey is most vulnerable—and explorers.
There are some humans who also become most alive at night. Many writers, artists, singers, and musicians prefer the night, relishing the time when no one is awake and, there is abundant psychic space in which to dream. Still, whatever their Circadian rhythms, humans create best where there is some light. Night painting, therefore, is a strange practice—privileging, as it does, the darkness over the light, attempting to break through its opacity. What motivates an artist to paint in the dark, perhaps in unknown terrain, lighting her way with a lamp attached to her head?
Susanna Coffey’s nocturnal landscapes are the results of such excursions. They are miniature windows into a sleeping world, where the door is left a bit ajar to allow only the slightest illumination to pierce through. These paintings make the viewer work. In focusing on these images, we replicate the adjustment the eye must make when we enter darkness. At first, we are unable to see anything at all—so dependent are we on the existence of light. But as we spend more time without light, our eyes slowly begin to adapt. And it is possible that more than our eyes adjust. Perhaps all our senses realign as we become more at home in the night.
This process of acclimation is also how we observe these paintings. The content is hidden at first, but the details reveal themselves over time. The longer we focus on them, the more their subtleties emerge. As this adjustment occurs, we begin to locate ourselves in space. We see the light in the darkness. Small windows and street lamps slowly animate the landscapes. Trees that before merged into dense clustered backgrounds begin to articulate themselves. As the lights of the paintings turn on, they splash their surroundings with illumination and small universes emerge, gradually familiarizing us with the terrain, pulling us in. Excited by what we now are able to observe, we find abstraction giving way to recognition.
We then marvel at how comfortable we have become in the dark, how safe it feels to roam, how rich is the environment heretofore hidden. Moving beyond disorientation, adapting to these locations, collecting bits of information, we too become creatures of the night. Satisfied with such observations, we realize that we have become adept at decoding these small, very precise landscapes, as if learning to navigate a recurring dream.