Night on the rocks

By working nights I´ve lost my sense of time. There are no weekdays, no weekends, no bedtimes, no nothing. It´s as if I was living in some kind of a time vacuum. There´s no end to a day. I can stay up untill three in the morning and see the break of dawn - and then climb up to my bed with a book.

I´m one of those people who you might see when you go to the toilet in the middle of the night and take a look outside and you see someone walking in the deserted street. What´s best, I get to see the best time of the day: the moment just before people start getting up and going to work. When the sun is already making its way up, seagulls are screaming, air is fresh after a chilly night and it´s silent like just before a storm. It´s feels unreal but at the same time really comforting in a way; there´s an order in the world.

Warm-up sketch. It´s always warm-up when I do something crappy.

Last night I kept myself up because I´ll work nights again in the weekend. I guess I´ve always been really settled in the way everyone spends their day but now I´ve been obliged to change my routines time-wise. I wanted to go out and paint landscapes. It was 11 in the night. So I went as it doesn´t get dark here in the North anyway.

I managed to paint a couple of impressions on the sunset before I got too cold. But it was indeed marvellous to sit there on a rock as if having the beach all to myself. I felt a bit like a criminal, stealing that moment and painting it without anyone knowing. I should do that more often...

Don´t mind the blurry windmill...