A deer stands in an empty intersection. A fox waits by a closed community pool. The gas station is lit but shut.
Nicholas Moegly paints American neighborhoods at the hour they stop belonging to anyone. Amber streetlight, everything else in deep blue and green. Nothing is lit for drama. Everything is lit like a parking lot, which is worse.
The animals aren’t the point. They’re the evidence. A deer standing calmly in a crosswalk tells you how long the people have been gone.
He came up making gig posters
Moegly works out of Cincinnati. Before this he was a graphic designer making concert posters, agency jobs until he went freelance in 2016. It shows. He knows how to build a single frame that stops you from across a room.
“I like to create quiet serene moments in my illustrations that are typically at night,” he says. “Creating mood is probably my favorite thing about my style.”
He started with Hopper. These days he says he’s looking at nighttime photography more than at painters. The comparisons people reach for are Todd Hido’s Houses at Night and Chris Van Allsburg, and both fit. Same sense of arriving a few minutes after the interesting thing happened.
Lately he’s moved from digital into oil, and he’s at work on the largest painting he’s attempted. He’s also starting to show in person instead of dropping work online.
Occasionally the logic slips and there’s a dinosaur in the subdivision. The painting doesn’t seem to mind.
See more at nicholasmoegly.com and @nicholasmoegly. Images © Nicholas Moegly.
More night work: Nori Yuasa’s night skies, a rainy evening in Bangladesh, fantastical animal portraits.
