Summer Nights

Over the last couple of weeks I have painted two nocturnes from memory, evocations of summer nights both past and present. While both of these paintings purport to depict East Texas, they also reside in childhood memories of warm summer nights and cool moonlight. As Thoreau said "the night is oracular."

A Summer Night

12 x 12

Oil on ACM panel

Moonlit Pines (still on the easel)

12 x 12

Oil on ACM panel

Nocturnes are intensely romantic images. In the 18th century they were often called 'moonlights'. The term nocturne was first used to describe a series of musical composition by Frederick Chopin in the 1820s. Within the next few decades literary circles in Paris embraced the nocturne, especially the Symbolist poets Rimbaud, Verlaine and Gautier. By the 1860s the motif of the nocturne as a lyrical form of expression that conjured altered states of perception was widely embraced across all the arts. Perhaps one of its best known proponents was James Abbott McNeil Whistler (1834-1903), an expatriate American artist living in London. Whistler, more than any other nineteenth century artist, reinvigorated the depiction of moonlit nights into a modern idiom. He appropriated the musical term “nocturne’ to describe his spare, murky depictions of nighttime along the Thames and in Venice. Whistler employed memory as a major component of his artistic practice, often observing a nighttime motif repeatedly before retreating to his studio to paint it.