Moonlight has mattered to me for as long as I can remember. It was there before painting, before language, before any conscious idea of what art might be. I have always worked at night. Not out of habit or romance, but because night changes the terms of attention.
Night has been Shaw’s working time since childhood, due to the solitude and concentration on which his paintings depend. As Shaw says “these are night paintings, and night in them is the time of their making as much as the hour they depict — the condition under which attention narrows, decisions take longer, and images are left to settle without the demands of the day pressing upon them.”
Shaw’s attachment to the nocturnal has many sources: the earliest memories of the moon seen from his maternal grandfather’s house in Kashmir; the poetry of Habba Khatoon, the Nightingale of Kashmir; the stories and religious observances of his childhood; opera; and Ludwig II of Bavaria, the Moon King, who reversed the clock and conducted his waking life by lamplight. He describes the works in Night Sonnets as conversations with himself.