Joshua Charadia

This painting is part of a series titled ‘Nocturnes’, which explores the nature of consciousness and perception through depictions of the industrial landscape at night. Working from photographs, I build up layers of oil paint to capture the peculiar beauty of these scenes which rarely earn our attention. As night falls, constellations of lights scatter across coastal ports and the dense infrastructure of container yards is transformed.



Embracing the spirit of Romanticism, I approach these usually cold and unyielding scenes through the lens of the personal and emotive. With a careful sensitivity to light and atmosphere, I reposition the mundane and ubiquitous as dynamic, mysterious and evocative, capturing moments of the sublime in the everyday. Through this juxtaposition I expand on the tradition of the nocturne; a visual, musical and literary form charged with centuries of creative contemplation.



Exploiting the parameters of photography, I capture my reference images in low light and in passing, resulting in an acute motion blur. This serves as a metaphor for sensory experience in today’s world, which is often truncated, redacted or fugitive. Familiar structures become abstract lines and shapes, and the solid becomes fluid, making for images that are familiar but just out of reach. Through the considered process of painting I highlight the complexities of colour, detail and form hidden within these scenes. I refocus the viewer’s attention to that which normally exists at the peripheries of consciousness and vision, inviting a renewed awareness of the world around us.