Narrow Street at Dusk
An oil on canvas of modest but deliberate scale, 20 by 30 inches, painted in 2018 from a sketch made at six in the evening. The title and the curator's note together fix the moment precisely: that brief interval when daylight has not quite gone and artificial light has not yet taken over, and the street belongs to neither.
Figures move away from the viewer down a damp street, their backs turned, absorbed into the scene rather than presented to it. The red walls that flank them are described as going dark, which suggests the palette works through deepening rather than contrast, the warmth of the masonry surrendering to the blue-grey of dusk rather than fighting it. Wetness on the street would carry whatever light remains, offering a faint luminosity underfoot even as the walls close down.
The composition, with its receding figures and narrowing perspective, draws attention inward and forward simultaneously, the eye following the figures while the architecture compresses the space around them. Painted from a direct observational sketch, the work carries the particular quality of something caught rather than constructed.