Firefly Moon.  Mixed media: straw & acrylic on canvas, 20 x 24 inches. I painted this scene the day after attending a bonfire and walking back in the dark—that is, dark except for light from fireflies, from the rising moon, and from flashlights. 

     Ever since I viewed an exhibit, To Know the Dark: American Artists' Visions of Night, Yale University, 2006-07, I have been occasionally moved to paint night scenes--not by night plein air painting but by painting from memory, sketches, and photographs since I am a morning person. 

     Quotations from literature accompanied the Yale exhibit include the poem by Wendell Berry which provided the title of that exhibit, To Know the Dark:

       To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.

       To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,

       and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,

       and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.