It would require some effort not to be subdued beneath the infinite majesty of the West Texas night sky. It is one of the reasons people live out here, and those less fortunate make pilgrimages from metropolitan areas for the experience. As an artist Katherine Alexander has taken on the daunting challenge of creating mnemonic tableaux that capture, what is a sequence of moments, in one image, occurring as the horizon line fades into darkness while the sky continues to glow from the indirect rays of the sun below the horizon.

This diminishing, refracted light in atmospherically charged layers of clouds, at this hour of the day, is often referred to as the “magic hour.” Although this is sometimes perceived as a static moment, it is a rapid-fire progression of changing atmospheric conditions, illuminated, from a raking angle, by the unseen light source of the sun. The fluid changes in this multi-dimensional montage are the result of rapidly diminishing light, dust particles in the atmosphere, and shape-shifting clouds forming at multiple altitudes, among many other variables. The moon then appears in a variety of configurations that define our lunar calendar, while planets (Venus often referred to as the “evening star”) and stars slowly become visible.

While these moments are beautifully and meticulously captured in Ms Alexander’s extraordinary paintings, in a specific sense, they never existed. As audiences of the West Texas night sky, we expect that we will see it again, presumably the following evening. Ms Alexander bases her paintings on this preconceived expectation. Our recollections of the evening sky are important to experiencing her paintings as she integrates her exacting, sensory observations, derived from decades of painting this subject, and then convincingly moves us further, into the realm of her imagination. Establishing a rapport with the viewer’s memory makes this a collaborative perception of shared experience.

Ms Alexander deftly combines her astute visual strategy with the physicality of the paint that she applies with brushstrokes onto the surface of the paper, creating a vast expanse of receding space that is the West Texas night sky, on a two-dimensional plane. Like sleight of hand magic, she pushes her paintings far beyond this perimeter to a point that fullfils a sensory and mnemonic experience that compels us to keep looking.