Twilight Scenes

Colour and light changes quickly as night falls, posing challenges for landscape painters. NICK CUDWORTH shares a wealth of experience capturing these fleeting moments on canvas.

What are the key challenges when it comes to painting in the evenings?

A close study of my paintings would be a good way into explaining my way of approaching the challenge inherent in painting the city of Bath at night. I began making this series of works around 2003 as a response to the need to create paintings of the city where I live that would be different from all the endless pretty pictures of it.

Nightfall was the first work I made, a sliver of the evening landscape in which I stripped out all the extraneous colour and detail, using only Cobalt Blue and Cadmium Yellow to capture the crepuscular light. This was the twilight time that began to fascinate me, when the daylight is drained from the sky, and a deep Cobalt Blue pervades everything for a few minutes before the deep indigo of the night sky blots this out.

The real challenge is capturing many varied light sources, something I did when I took things further with Night Lights. This included the touch of gold of the setting sun, the rising moonlight catching the façades of the buildings in cold blue-black light, the street lighting heightening the lit facings of these buildings, and the artificial lights beginning to appear in the windows.

Your night paintings remain saturated with colour, despite their subject. How do you go about developing them?