There is no moment of more intense color and beauty than a sunset in California. The light is perfect for just that moment and then changes and that instant is gone.

SUNSETS are a synthesis of that moment. You come up over the hill, and you see a moment of sunset, you feel an inner awe at the color and the intensity, you try to hold time still, to grab for the camera, to hold it in your mind. The sun sinks and the light changes and that supreme aesthetic, that moment you found resonant is gone.

In that moment of trying to hold and encompass, you widen the senses, to grab the panorama. Instead of concentrating on the colors and center and light over the ocean, you widen your attention and focus. The sunset is clear, but you also try to hold the periphery – road, sand, sidewalk, trees, silhouettes of buildings, the bright light cascading across, the color tinges from the experience. All of that.

If I painted photographically, the scene would look crystal clear. You would see the clarity of each item or the calculated blur. Take a photograph of a sunset – it will remind you of the memory of that, but it won’t do more than suggest the experience.

That moment of focus, of seeing the center and widening your awareness and consciousness to try and include the whole scene and experience and memory – that’s what these are.

Expressionism, abstract, but with reference to representation and form and space.

My growing up was sunsets. I was born in Berkeley, California. Almost immediately I lived in New Haven, Connecticut, in Eugene, Oregon, and in Urbana, Illinois. At the age of seven I moved from the flat anonymous suburbs of Illinois, where the highest elevation was a pile of dirt left on the vacant land at the edge of the subdivision, to Del Mar, California, a town on the coast of California north of San Diego.

I used to wake up at 5:00 AM, to cold light and fog, and sneak out across the back deck, down the path to the carport, out the driveway, down the hill to the path through to Pacific Coast Highway, dart across 101, out to the bluffs, down across the railway tracks, down stairs or path or rough trails in iceplant to the sandstone bluff and then the sand – clear expanses of endless sand stretching in my imagination north to Canada, south to the Chilean coast.

Early morning almost always meant fog, burning off through the day.

To paint the experience of a sunset.

A sunset is that expansion of perception and focus, widened to perceive the sunset, that aesthetic form, and as wide a focus of perception around and beyond that as possible in an effort to freeze the moment and capture a full sense of it.

That effort moves toward the realization of an ecstatic perceptive experience – and as a visually oriented being (can you tell?) I try to become part of that experience – that’s the sunset I want to communicate. Sunsets actually. This is the product of watching and falling in love all over again with the sun through clouds and sky descending to the ocean to the west. I hope it comes through.

A painting should be a communication, profound and deep at best, to the core of the spirit.

The ultimate sunset would be a resonance of the perceptions I experience in seeing the original, experiencing the original – sight is easy, that’s direct reflected light and accuracy of perception – but that exact reflection, that’s not the experience. The artist adds and subtracts to bring about a communication of experience and vision.

So what is my sunset? It is a viewpoint of experience hitting harmony and gestural movement of paint and illusion of form and space, non-specific enough to invite the placing of form and space by the audience, but clear enough to direct the senses and the viewpoint into my world at that moment. Like music, it is visceral, felt communication, there should be an element of ecstatic experience, transcendence.

Rothko said better to tell less than more, and reduced his elements to more and more simplicity.

If I take a picture to capture an aesthetic moment – that simple photograph, without context and explanation, falls short in bring across that experience to someone else seeing it separately – my intention in painting is to bring about that additional communication of context and viewpoint – as if I explained vividly the entire context and experience. Art has the ability to transcend being a literal visual experience and to become much more, magical, and communicate experience in full.

To freeze a moment of aesthetic in time, to hold it and express that reaching to hold it in the mind in time, that exultation at the beauty and then that realization that it will be gone, changed, and that wishing to hold the experience. That’s the intention behind the images in this series.

The contrast between New England and the West Coast of California…

Looking at DelMar in Google Earth – a tremendous feeling of nostalgia, longing, sorrow and loss for something that at the time was just – there. Uprooted from Illinois, planted in California, great, there’s a beach, and a lifestyle unapproachable anywhere else – an amazing childhood environment, both in time and in space. But it was just there. I was awed by the sunsets despite that lack of context. I am awed by the sunsets.

I am an ex-pat, an expatriate. There is a tension is finding sunsets to express from a West Coast view of the world, while living in New England. This sense of distance, of separation, and the bridging of that, is part of this series. The warmth and glow of these images is emotionally acute when there is a fresh 6′ snowfall outside the window and a temperature of 17 degrees.

Time is a constant acquiring of new experience from one look at it. And an immense abyss of loss ongoing and continuous from a different viewpoint.

Sunsets are archetypal, generalized through simplified form – details picked up and suggested to the viewer through gestures in paint. Surface texture, gestural, painterly, form and color all working toward a generalized and slightly abstracted idea of a sunset. Order from initial chaos. Texture and form that pulls to the surface, but a whole that suggests progression into space.

Demonstrating the ethereal beauty of a sunset and through that both the timelessness in that moment as spiritual and ephemeral in the effort to hold it still and fail, showing it as failed.

— spence