Looking Into My Painting "After Hours" (2025)

Natsumi Goldfish, "After Hours", Oil on Canvas (4 panels), 72”x36”, 2025

The idea of my recent work "After Hours" comes from a unique moment in the day. It is the time of day when everything planned for the day has already happened, and we can stop checking the clock. After hours, when the sun is set; businesses are closed, and many people are already sleeping. We all experience this in city life, where the clock dominates our lives more than the weather. It is a time when we don’t need to present ourselves as "normal", and the value of the real world fades. I’m thinking of this situation as a timeless moment.

After hours is a time when we can dream about anything from down-to-earth ideas to otherworldly ideas. It is a moment that belongs neither fully to the present nor to any action. Thoughts drift backward – to earlier in the day, to distant memories, or to dreams from the night before – or forward, toward tomorrow’s private plans: a meeting, a date, an unfinished book, a task left undone. Sometimes the mind travels elsewhere entirely, to another place or another subject altogether. It is a time for contemplation, when the body remains where it is, but the spirit moves freely, no longer required to occupy the same space.
I wanted the painting to feel entirely visible, almost like a fish tank — everything exposed and on display — yet without offering clarity or fixed interpretation. Nothing in the scene delivers a definitive answer or message. Instead, the viewer is invited to linger, to wonder, and to question what they are seeing.


About a few details in this painting people asked me about:
-The lady in this painting is a glowing figure and is intended to reflect the multiple sources of light—and not intended to specifically be a nude.

-There are a total of eight fireflies – suggestively echoing the symbol of infinity — strangely inhabiting the room. Two species are present, Heike-botaru and Genji-botaru, divided between the right and left sides of space, yet coexisting in quiet harmony. Fireflies live only briefly after reaching maturity, and their simple flashes of light are not merely romantic signals, as they are often imagined, but their primary means of communication. Each time they illuminate, they expend what may be their last reserve of energy.

-The wristwatch on the stack of books has a bird cage-like shape (the original watch I was inspired by was called a cloche) but the watch doesn’t have hands. Hands flew away.

-The book on top of the stack is called Tsuki-ni-hoeru (Howling at the moon) 1917 by Hagiwara Sakutaro. He is a Japanese poet known for his challenge of liberating Japanese free verse from the grip of traditional rules, and he is considered the “father of modern colloquial poetry in Japan.” I read many books and my favorite books are older out of print books and relatively unknown books from Japan. My country is known for its reading culture and there are millions of books with great knowledge and stories that I feel can be rediscovered.