Narrator: Imagine you were walking down your street at night. What might you see?
This painting by the artist Norman Lewis is called City Night. Let’s look a little closer and think about why the artist called it that.
Most of the canvas is cloaked in black, except for the center which looks like a tight bundle of green, yellow, blue, and brown shapes. Some people see these colorful shapes as the buildings lining both sides of a street. If you look even more closely, you’ll see some very thin lines sweeping across the canvas. They almost look like the laundry lines or power lines that go from building to building in a city. Here’s the artist.
Artist, Norman Lewis: I remember just walking around Canal Street and in this area I keep wondering, with the new things that I see, what am I going to paint, what am I going to do? I used to paint pictures about how people followed each other and the movement of people. But then the things became less and less realistically human looking. Instead of showing a lot of heads it was just a blob of black paint or white paint. And eventually, I found that painting, like music, has nothing to do with what exists, it has another kind of reality.
Narrator: What colors or details would you include if you painted a picture of your street at night?