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The “City Nightscape” was a new term during the time around 1992 after Randy had started painting the large and smaller format paintings of Denver and Chicago. At that point in time there were few artists working in city nightscapes – probably because the inner city at night was not a friendly place to explore. In the books Randy had read on Georgia O’Keefe and Hopper, the subject of nightscapes was briefly touched upon, but the subject had slipped into relative obscurity from the mainstream gallery world. Randy was eager to be on the cutting edge of a new trend in subject matter and his curiosity and enthusiasm urged him forward, confidently pushing the envelope in historic directions.
In a 2003 interview in Southwest Art Magazine, Randy says:
The street level pedestrian gives the viewer the excitement of the multiple light source experience. Without one sun and/or one source of light you have a multitude of lights all bouncing off of anything and everything – from sodium lights to florescent lights, incandescent and halogen lights, all in various shapes and intensities, messing with your pupils, dilating and hiding, fixating and corrupting your eyes’ every movement. First you must learn to photograph the night, then you must learn to paint what you remember seeing from those studies and notes.
The city Randy had known by day went from gray pavement, gray cars, gray buildings and gray suits to a full range of color by night and the very souls of buildings and nightlife came to the surface. This was the exact experience Randy Pijoan had wanted from the city in the first place. After being raised in the mountains of Colorado, with no big city experience to draw from, he knew that his innocent eyes viewing the city at night were seeing it fresher than the jaded eyes of the long-time city resident. Ever since, critics, artists and collectors continue to watch with great anticipation for the new work of Randy Pijoan’s city nightscapes and other city subject matter.
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