Moon

Moon is a painting made in 2015 by Michael Creese, an American painter known for brightly colored, heavily textured oil paintings of landscapes, seascapes and night skies that are widely circulated as prints. It shows a crescent moon over the open sea at night. We have not been able to confirm its size or current owner.

What you are looking at

The canvas is divided almost exactly in half by a straight, dark horizon.

The upper half is the sky. A thin crescent moon hangs left of center, its curved edge a bright line of white and pale yellow, the dark part of the disc faintly visible inside it. Around it, clouds churn in thick, swept strokes of violet, slate blue, black and dusty pink, with flashes of orange and red near the horizon at left and right, as if the last of the sunset is still caught in them. At the top edge, the clouds turn nearly black.

The lower half is the sea, dark navy and black. A path of reflected light runs from the horizon toward us, broken into short horizontal strokes of cream, pale blue and gold, and the waves in the foreground are built from heavy ridges of paint in indigo, teal and blue, with occasional sparks of red and orange.

How it was made

The paint is applied thickly, probably with a palette knife as well as brushes, so the surface has real relief. The strokes follow the movement of the forms: diagonal and swirling in the clouds, horizontal and choppy in the water. The colors are heightened well beyond what the eye would see at night, which gives the image its dreamlike intensity. The method recalls the expressive night scenes of earlier painters such as Van Gogh in The Starry Night, though the subject is far simpler.

Meaning

There is no narrative here, only mood. The crescent moon has a long history in art as a sign of night, change, solitude and the feminine, and the moonlit sea has been a subject for painters from the Dutch Golden Age, as in Aert van der Neer's moonlit scenes, to the Romantics. Creese's painting belongs to that tradition while addressing a contemporary audience that encounters such images mainly as reproductions and online.

Where to see it

We have not confirmed the location of the original. See also Munch's Starry Night, our Romanticism collection and the Michael Creese page.