We share the sun...

The Scream by Edvard Munch is as iconic as a setting sun. Scientists now believe it most likely was painted as a latent response to the menacing red skies that enveloped Oslo after the 1883 Krakatoa volcanic eruption.

Ray Davies of the Kinks wrote Waterloo Sunset as an ode to the area around Waterloo tube station in London where as a child he spent time convalescing in a hospital and then much later met his first love. It was released as a 7-inch single in 1967.

A year earlier in 1966, Ed Ruscha photographed every building on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles and made a fold out book that measures 27 feet long. Ruscha said he was looking at everything on the street, not just the buildings.

Landscape photographers suggest that the best sunset photographs don’t focus on the sun but use the saturated light to highlight other things in the frame.

Blocking out the sun is one way to slow global warming. Scientists are debating whether or not to employ a method where aerosol gases injected into the stratosphere will force the sun’s rays to reflect back into space and avoid reaching the earth.

The actor Ethan Hawke covered the song Waterloo Sunset on the 2018 soundtrack album for the film Juliet-Naked, which he starred in.

Someone who loves sunsets is called an opacarophile.

“We cannot express the light in nature because we have not the sun. We can only express the light we have in ourselves.” Arthur Dove, American painter (1880–1946)

Leah Singer, New York City, 2.3.23