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Bühlstrasse
Oil on canvas · 70 × 100 cm · 2025
I had never painted a night scene, so one evening I went out to try, right around the corner from my apartment in Bern, at the intersection with Bühlstrasse.
Bern’s streetlights today are plain cool-white LEDs. Before painting, I therefore tinted the photo yellow myself to mimic the warm light of the sodium-vapor lamps that were common in the 1970s. I just liked the effect: everything appears in a strangely saturated orange; headlights blur into streaks; a storefront disappears into the shadows; a passerby crosses the scene right in the middle of this light. For me, color is the central element in this painting—even though the street doesn’t look anything like that anymore.