Evening Walks through Learned Cities

Evening Walks Through Learned Cities by Anthony Carey, a densely textured abstract painting with vertical multicoloured forms gathering above passages of deep blue.
  • Detail of Evening Walks Through Learned Cities showing dense raised marks in green, orange, red and white, built by repeatedly striking the canvas with a paint-covered copper rod, above textured blue passages.

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About the work

Evening Walks Through Learned Cities takes its title from a line in W. H. Auden’s poem Paysage Moralisé. I was drawn to the poem’s movement between cities, mountains, valleys and water, and to its sense of people imagining other places while remaining bound to the lives and sorrows they already carry.


The painting is also connected to long afternoons I spent in Dublin’s Botanic Gardens. I would walk among the trees and cultivated spaces before sitting near the statue of Socrates, close to the rose garden and the river. I found myself talking to him as though he might answer. Those conversations were one-sided, but speaking aloud created somewhere for thoughts that had no other destination. The surrounding vegetation, water and changing colour may also have entered the painting, although it was never intended as a literal view of the gardens.


Much of the surface was made by covering the end of a copper brazing rod in paint and repeatedly striking the canvas. The rod was only one millimetre thick, so the dense accumulation of marks developed very slowly. Across the upper part of the painting, they gather into forms that may suggest vegetation, crowds or the compressed structures of a city, while the lower blue passages open into something closer to water or reflection.


The work brings together the imagined landscapes of Auden’s poem, the physical experience of walking and the private act of speaking to a silent figure. What remains is the sense of another territory briefly opening within a familiar place.


Artwork details
2026
Acrylic on canvas
70 × 50 cm
Private Collection