I pursued three aims in this painting – firstly I was exploring light, which is something I love to do in everything I paint. Sun hidden behind clouds, shafts breaking through, tree obscuring the light but the leaves set ablaze by it, reflections off the sunlit foreground, the kangaroos in the shadows, and the benighted suburbs in the valley below with the blurry glow of its streetlights.
Closely related to that was just the feel of the golden light you see around my hometown of Canberra around sunset, especially when you climb a hill – the city was built on old farmland, and the many hills have all been left empty with abundant walking trails & are slowly becoming wild places, There’s a special magical stillness around sunset that you only feel when you’re up there.
And lastly, I wanted to capture the fading beauty of nature as best I could, contrasting it with human progress and development. It’s no accident that the hillside is sunlit while the valley is already, as I described, benighted. I liked the idea of implying that the people below are blinkered, reliant on their artificial lights, seeing only what happens within the reach of their glow, and blinded to the glory of the natural environment around them. And that glory is indeed fading – the hillside is mostly denuded, full of weeds, and the tree is dropping its leaves.
“Night falls quickly in the valley” is acrylic and ink on 122x90cm hardboard, and will be part of my exhibition in Canberra in October 2023.
In the images below, note the one taken at night and how differently some paintings can appear under artificial light. This particular one seems to really spring to life!
