I’m writing this on a freezing cold day at the beginning of December, as the sun goes down and the sky over New York City’s Upper West Side turns an opaque cobalt blue. The moon is up there, a blurred crescent shape; below, the lights are going on across the darkening facades. This is the moment when the city becomes as unreal as a diorama: rushing crowds, massive buildings, and that gorgeously decorative sky. Suddenly, everything we’ve thought and felt during the day is folded into a big, beautiful romantic vision. The stage manager is nature; but the effect is anything but natural.

Violet Baxter catches something of that moment in her pastels of dusk in New York City’s Union Square neighborhood. I didn’t know Baxter’s work until I saw her show this past October at the Pleiades Gallery. Since seeing the pastels, I’ve found that they rise up in the mind’s eye at the hour when evening comes to the city. Baxter has a studio on Union Square, and in the cycle of “Union Square Variations” that she does in delicate passes of pastel strokes across her paper, she stirs up quite a mood. Her skies are like sheets of velvet: they’re blue-violet or orange-red. These never-never-land skies set the romantic tone. At the same time, Baxter is curious about the more prosaic aspects of city life. The ordinary sights that she records from her sky-high window give the full-tilt romanticism its saving caustic edge.

Baxter