Between Day and Night, the Light Glows (The Gathering)

2025, oil on canvas, 48 x 36 x 1.5 in plus brass floater frame

There’s a brief slice of time when day has ended, night has arrived, and the world feels more alive than either. This painting holds you in that interval. Darkness has settled into the trees, but human warmth pushes back: a small group gathers around a fire, their bodies edged in electric color, a house behind them glowing like a lantern in the woods. What could be an ordinary evening—just a cabin, a clearing, a circle of light—tilts into something mythic.

The neon-bright palette exaggerates what you can’t quite see: the low murmur of conversation, the comfort of familiar voices, the kind of silence you share only with people you trust. The trees rise like quiet witnesses, their branches catching and fracturing the firelight the way memory later breaks the night into flashes—gesture, tone, laughter, the feeling of sitting close to people you love. Time stretches. For a moment, you’re held between intimacy and vastness, shelter and wilderness, presence and disappearance.

When you live with this painting, the light becomes a stand-in for connection itself—the glow that keeps us tethered to one another when the world grows dark. It’s a reminder of how naturally we move toward fire and toward each other, and how night sharpens the line between what is visible and what is felt, long after the evening ends.