Few painters would consider after dusk to be the best time to head out into the field, brush in hand, to capture the world’s beauty. However, for Powell River painter Alfred Muma, 62, the night time is the right time.
For more than 40 years Muma has been experimenting and developing his night paintings. The technique aims to capture the beauty of night-time colours, particularly on clear nights with the evening sky shining bright.
He has painted hundreds of pictures, but his love began as a boy when visiting the Art Gallery of Ontario. Group of Seven muse Tom Thomson’s night sketches of Algonquin Provincial Park invaded the young man’s imagination. One of particular importance was Thomson’s painting of a moose coming out of the water, which Muma wondered how he painted at night without being able to see.
Muma’s book begins with the first night painting he made, one created while sitting in a canoe in the middle of Rock Lake in Algonquin Park in 1972.
“I was just sitting there looking at the lights on the shore and the stars and I learned that you really can paint in the dark,” he said.
Muma said that he borrowed the canoe and a lantern and headed out to the middle of the lake. With the lantern in front of his canvas he could not see what he was painting. He moved the lantern behind him and he could see what he was doing but the light from the lantern was so bright he could not see the stars or Northern Lights.
“As soon as the light was out, it was just incredible,” Muma said, adding that he learned that night to set up the colours on the palette before turning the light out and trying to remember where each was. “I was lucky to get it right. I had no idea what it looked like at the time,” he said. The next morning, when he crawled out of his tent, he looked at the painting and saw what he had accomplished. “Maybe Thomson really did paint that moose that night,” he added.
The book, appropriately titled Out of the Dark, is organized geographically as well as historically, Muma said. “It progresses all the way up to the last painting in the book, the back cover, which was painted in 2013 in York, England,” he said. Muma and his family visited York on holiday and he painted a number of images including York’s Millennium Bridge, the image on the back cover.
Muma grew up in Ontario so there are a number of images from around Toronto at the start of the book. In the early 1980s Muma and his family moved to Haida Gwaii and lived near Sandspit for 12 years before moving to Powell River. Muma made a habit of taking his painting equipment on trips to capture night scenes from the various cities around BC and the world.
“What I learned after that first night, you just have to go by instinct, by intuition,” he said. “You have to believe you can do it or else you just make a mess.”
Ontario landscape painter Michael Dobson, a friend of Muma’s, agreed to write the forward for the book.
Out of the Dark is being printed by Friesen Press this spring and will be available for purchase at Breakwater Books and Coffee as well as through the author.
