Night Sky #2

This is a painting of a night sky, made by Vija Celmins in 1991. It measures about 18 by 21 and a half inches, so it is less than two feet wide. You could carry it under one arm. Yet it shows something enormous: a dark field scattered with stars. The paint is alkyd, a type of paint that dries quickly, applied to canvas that has been mounted on aluminum. The surface looks smooth and velvety, and the whole picture is made of blacks, whites, and silvery grays.

Start by searching for a horizon. You will not find one. There is no ground, no edge, and no landmark anywhere in the picture, so your eye has nothing to rest on. Next, move closer and look at the tiny points of light across the dark. Notice how they seem to glow like jewels, and how the grays and whites shift from one patch to another. Finally, look at the surface itself. It is remarkably smooth, with no obvious brushstrokes, as if the paint had been polished.

Vija Celmins was born in Latvia in 1938 and became an American artist. From the mid-1960s she began working from photographs she found in books, magazines, and newspapers, often bought secondhand or at yard sales. Her night skies come from satellite photographs. To get the soft, even surface, she often puts on several layers of paint and sands each one down before adding the next. Sanding means rubbing the surface with rough paper to smooth it. Since the early 1970s she has also made careful pictures of desert floors, ocean waves, and the surface of the moon.

The museum describes this painting as both romantic and unsettling. It is romantic because of its jewel-like stars and its sense of vastness. It is unsettling because nothing in it tells you where you are standing. With no horizon, no landmark, and nothing at human scale, it is hard to know how you relate to what you see. The small size adds to this, since something so huge is squeezed into a modest rectangle. Celmins was interested in how images are made, not in selling things. Try looking at one patch of stars for a full minute.