End of the Night
2019, Acrylic on cold pressed paper, 4’W x 16”H
I was commissioned by an old friend from the theater to create a piece about our friendship. Most of our youth had been spent drinking with the other young people of New York City’s theater scene at a bar called South’s which had been shut down almost a year before. It remained a beacon of our youth and the right subject for a memory piece.
While I allowed myself a visit to the old Souths store front to draw some sketches of the windows, I made a point not to reference photos for these paintings, so everything came from what I could remember. Small architectural details, lighting, and even the scale of the bar itself morphs and changes through the panels, the way memories do as they fade. The perspective of each image of the facade moves steadily to the right through the piece, allowing the angle of the sidewalk to “tick up”, mimicking the hands of a clock approaching midnight. I painted the last panel at 5am to make sure I got the color of the sky right.
