THE NIGHTMARE NETWORK - View Single Post

G. S. Carnivals · 09-02-2007

	I have painted it, tried to at least. Oiled it, watercolored it, smeared it upon a mirror which I positioned to rekindle the glow of the real thing. And always in the abstract. Never actual sinking suns in spring, autumn, winter skies; never a sepia light descending over the trite horizon of a lake, not even the particular lake I like to view from the great terrace of my massive old mansion. But these Twilights of mine were not merely abstraction, which after all is just a matter of technique, a method for keeping out the riff-raff of the real world. Other painterly abstractionists may claim that nothing is represented by their canvasses, and probably nothing is: a streak of iodine red is just a streak of iodine red, a patch of flat black equals a patch of flat black. But pure color, pure light, pure lines and their rhythms, pure form in general all means much more than that. The others have only seen their dramas of shape and shade; I - and it is impossible to insist on this too strenuously - I have been there. And my twilight abstractions did in fact represent some reality, somewhere, sometime: a zone formed by palaces of soft and sullen color standing beside seas of scintillating pattern and beneath sadly radiant skies; a zone in which the visitor himself is transformed into a formal essence, a luminous presence, free of substances - a citizen of the abstract.

	Thomas Ligotti - “The Lost Art of Twilight”