Anneli Skaar – Chasing the Blue Hour

Even at a young age, I was keenly aware of light, especially how it shifted during my family’s annual summer trips to Norway to visit my grandparents. This was back when travel felt long and tedious, without the ease of today’s transatlantic journeys: just a knapsack of crayons, a pad of newsprint paper, and a single in-flight movie with uncomfortable, stethoscope-like headphones. We’d fly from San Francisco to Seattle, then on to Copenhagen, before finally stumbling to my grandmother’s door outside Oslo some thirty-six hours later.

What stayed with me most was not just the relief of arrival, but the sensation of crossing into a different kind of light. We’d leave the warm, golden glow of June in Northern California and step into the cool, blue tones of Norway. It was a visceral shift, a feeling of arrival that extended beyond geography. Even now, fifty years later, I still notice it as the plane descends over the forests that surround Gardermoen Airport when I go to visit my mother. The trees appear blue-black, not dark green. The air is dense with a blue filter.

I think this is part of what draws me to Maine, the familiarity of its northern light. Sometimes I’ll imagine the Scandinavian peninsula fitting neatly into the curve of Penobscot Bay, though of course that’s not entirely right. Midcoast Maine sits at the latitude of Genoa or Cannes, not Oslo. Still, I hold onto the comparison: the rocky shoreline, a fjord Down East, and the similar wildflowers—Maine cousins all quietly echoing the landscape of my childhood and my many years living and working in Norway. And yes, the bluish light.

Den blå timen, or the blue hour (co-opted from the French l’heure bleue) is more than a very common expression in Norwegian; it carries a lot of cultural weight. From Harald Solberg’s landscapes of the Rondane mountain range to Edvard Munch’s blue and melancholy midsummer shadows, this space of twilight in such a northern country is a natural touchpoint and inspiration. This is apparent especially during the long shadows of winter and the midsummer’s liminal midnights. It’s a threshold between day and night, where light barely remains. In the last ten years, I have chased this light around the Arctic, from the coastal regions of western Greenland to the middle of the North Atlantic aboard a container ship, from the surface of the ice outside Longyearbyen in the Svalbard archipelago to my studio back home in Maine, looking out onto the Curtis Island Lighthouse.

Light feels like a temporal suspension to me. It’s a state of insomnia, of restraint, and of threshold. It exists outside of clear time; it’s neither day nor night. With that ambiguity, perception shifts. Distances become hard to measure, and spatial relationships lose their certainty. Forms flatten, dissolve, or emerge slowly, and the eye is no longer able to grasp the image all at once. I often work with low light because it slows the act of seeing. It asks the viewer to remain longer and to search. I am interested in holding the viewer in a state of “almost knowing.” This attraction to low light extends beyond landscape into still life. Borrowing from Luminism’s restrained handling of light, my focus remains on atmosphere taking precedence over the view.

Regardless of subject, I want to hold perception at the edge of visibility. I ration light deliberately, allowing only small points of illumination to enter the field: the moon, a glint on the edge of a cloud, a distant lit window, dark backgrounds, a reflection on water. These points do not fully describe the entire space. They do not illuminate in a traditional sense; instead, these points act as coordinates. They offer orientation without offering any sort of full resolution. I want them to function as small certainties within uncertain fields.

Signum is the result of a residency in Svalbard, Norway, which I sought out specifically for its extended civil twilight, the nautical term which is when the sun lies between zero and six degrees below the horizon. It’s a period of time between extremes in Svalbard, between the twenty-four hour darkness and the twenty-four hours of sunlight. During my time there in February 2015, I never saw the sun, only the suggestion of it. The world existed entirely within this blue register. It was muted, continuous, and disorienting. On a snowmobile trip far outside the town’s borders, we came across a mountain marked by a single point of light. It felt almost impossible. It was so minimal, yet so dominant within the landscape. When I asked what it was, I was told it was the location of a radio.

Despite its smallness, that light reorganized the entire landscape. The surrounding mountains were bathed in blue, their edges softened to the point where sky and land collapsed into one another. Distance was unreadable, yet that single point held everything in place. The point of light was both an unnatural intrusion and a kind of comfort: a proof of life, a signal of human presence in an otherwise cold, vast, and immeasurable void of endless landscape.

I carried the memory of that view long after returning to Maine. At its root, Signum means “mark” or “signal.” It’s something that points beyond itself. In the painting, the light does not illuminate the scene, it doesn’t clarify or reveal, but it stands as an indication of something. It suggests something is there without making it fully visible. This distinction is important to me.

I want to use light not to illuminate but to conceal. I want to limit access and withhold full clarity but also invite interpretation. And especially because I work within representational painting, I feel the need to veil my subjects and keep them slightly out of reach.

A more recent painting, one that is currently still drying in my studio, is Pink Sun. Although fully illuminated by a morning sun above a lake, I wanted the landscape to feel not quite awake yet. The many points of light on the water become gestural rather than a source of illumination, a symbol of consciousness beginning to emerge from slumber. Meaning is not delivered immediately, but emerges slowly through attention.

In Daymark, a familiar navigational structure in the Fox Island Thoroughfare is reduced to an abstracted silhouette by the backlighting from the sunset over the Camden Hills in the background. In Difficulty Sleeping, the familiar silhouette of the Curtis Island Lighthouse is painted in one of the countless ways I have done over the years which has seen the atmosphere and meaning shifting wildly according to the time of day. A clichéd subject, the lighthouse becomes a scene of the passage of time rather than a familiar tourist structure.

In Atlantic Herring, a tiny fish is like a tiny moon, creating light through reflecting the source of illumination, not by creating it.

I think my work continues to return to those first childhood experiences of crossing into light: blue, pink, gold, or otherwise. Not as a place, but as a condition, and one that continues to shape how I see and how I paint. I think light slows perception, softens distance, and keeps the full information within the image just out of reach, and invites the viewer to an extended experience. I think what remains is a signal, sustaining my work at the edge of full visibility.