In Brutalist Dusk, I’m painting a sky just after the sun has set. Looking at the sky at dusk, I’ve sometimes thought to myself, “I want to call this a pale ultramarine blue” but the colour looks silver. How can this be? The effect seems deep, but compared to the deepening shadows bathing things on the earth, the colours of the sky are pale. Then, perhaps, I see faint magentas dancing about in the ultramarine and my eye wanders around looking for comparisons. I realized recently that I’m trying to analyze gradients… a subtle and seemingly infinite series of gradients, dark to light, warm to cool, just like I struggle to grasp my mood as the day recedes into evening and I’m not sure what I’ve accomplished in the day and I feel something like vulnerability but also a weird excitement at the impossible depth of the fragile sky above us. Why do I love this? I can’t say. This is a flame to this old moth. 

It’s conceptually hard to pin down any point along the line of a gradient… they exist in a state of transition, of motion, a blurry state, or series of states, between fixed categories, such as human/animal, foreground/background, left/right, rich/poor, pink/blue etc.

What worries me is there are so many magical phenomena people seem to take for granted. They can’t be captured, but they can be evoked.