Waterfront at Night

Known primarily for his paintings of spaceships and futuristic scenes, Alexander Maldonado endowed this harbor scene with a radiant, visionary quality. Searchlights, a moon, and a brilliant sky illuminate the glowing water. We enter the frame alongside the artist, standing behind him in the bow of a boat in the center foreground. The boat cuts through the choppy waves, while a military plane crosses the sky. On the shore, the buildings are covered with dots of intense color that give them a wonderful texture. Maldonado further emphasized his illumination theme by painting small images of upward-shining spotlights on the frame’s lower corners---a touch that gives the frame a stagelike quality. The setting is almost certainly San Francisco, where the artist lived nearly all his life. He worked in the shipyards until he retired at the age of sixty, when his sister encouraged him to take up painting. (Tom Patterson, Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum: Contemporary Folk Art, 2001)