Night Watching

It is rare thing to be alone when you live in a city.

In her Age column, Kate Holden recently recounted the story of her passing by the Domain gardens at midnight, and stopping to 'walk just a little way into their dark expanse and sit for a moment in rare, total solitude'. Holden admits being a little nervous - a woman alone in a garden at midnight - but she also cherished sitting there in 'this eerily still open place, where no one was looking and no one knew I was...breathing in a sense of wonderful strangeness'. Familiar places when stripped away of their colour and life become strange to us. The peopled daytime world of trams, offices, caffeine, ipods and mobile phones is what we're comfortable with; we're used to being plugged-in and switched-on. But perhaps the best way of connecting with ourselves is to unplug from the world. As Holden found, sometimes it can be profoundly rewarding to stop, and to silently, simply 'be'.

I read Kate Holden's column in the cafe of the NGV's Ian Potter Gallery and then, in one of those moments of serendipity, found myself standing in front of Domenico de Clario's series of night paintings: Twenty-two paintings - Breathing for Biagio Walking (2005-6). Like Holden, de Clario had put himself, alone at night, into the landscape. He was interested in exploring 'the exchange between the inner world and the outer' - what our eyes see, and the ambiguities that are brought on by darkness and 'unknowingness'. His series of paintings were created by driving along the road between Perth and Kellerberrin at night, and stopping every 10km to paint what he saw. At first glance, the canvases are black, but as your eyes adjust, you become aware of the layers of blackness in the paintings and can make out shapes: trees, horizon lines, buildings and (perhaps) a gravestone.

In these cold winter months, darkness surrounds us - the days get shorter and the shadows longer. We turn inside, to our homes and whatever other cosy corners and warm places we can find. But next time you're alone at night, take a moment to accept silence and solitude - even for just a moment - and find some clarity in the unclear, ambiguous darkness.


By Beth Hall