Edward Hopper said that if a subject were spectacular – like a sunset – you couldn’t add anything to it. Yet he painted a fair number of sunsets and was always able to integrate them into his mood or message. What I think he meant was that no “mere” subject should be allowed to carry the day.

When I painted this small, but (to me) revolutionary image, I was aghast at how fleeting a sunset was. Yet it is reasonable that such garish color and metamorphic display should be. What if such scene-stealing went on for an entire day? It seems that nature is not only organically functional, but aesthetically apropos. If such effects aren’t worth waiting for, of what value are they?

Yet painting this sunset was close to a first for me. I was somewhat intimidated by the genre. Its “obvious” poetry was both barrier and invitation. It dared you to paint it, yet laughed at you when you did. Yet every landscape painter of any substance has wandered into a sunset and put his stamp on it.

Yet it has to be respected. Even the nonobjective painter might agree with this premise - even as he or she ignores the world of the senses and jumps into a frigid hole that’s comfortably subject-free. At one time, I thought a painter earned the right to stand before a sunset and not be hornswaggled. I believed all such powerful moments required a certain mastery to contain them. They had so many associations, such otherworldly intensity. There were landscape conventions requiring that sunsets be used sparingly – sparingly because they were potentially cliché-ridden things. There was the academic angle as well. Certain effects were “diploma pieces” while others, being the stuff of everyday life, were unglamorous things of no special consequence.

I don’t necessarily believe that, though there is something to the notion of great subjects and merely good ones – which is to say: between a normally sunshiny day and its fiery conclusion. At no other time is the notion change so vividly, but subtly, demonstrated. Color does not normally shift by the moment, but in graduated stages. Form doesn’t break apart, except during the most violent spasms. Finally, life doesn’t climax except at its very end. And yet with every sunset, we see a shocking dissolution, followed by a serene after-image which becomes the night sky. It is an exhilarating experience, not only to watch - but attempt to paint - a sunset.

Why I did one, after being sunset-free for so long, is unclear to me. I think the more work you do, the more you can do; your confidence increases with each risk you take – and with every practical failure. I had no money in those days, so it is possible that I was “going for broke” that evening because I had nothing to lose and everything to gain.