R.E. Slater - City Lights Collection

 

An AI reproduction of atmospheric urban realism using impressionistic expressionism.
Painting by Niaz Hannan watercolors.

Evening, After Rain

by R.E. Slater

Twilight settles upon

the edges of busy city streets,

forming long, dusky lines of

lengthening golds and greys.

Unformed figures pass

one another in shadowy

indifference gathering

like the evening airs

breathing new life.

Lifeless windows darken

above pulsing traffic lights,

shadowing tired hearts

washed of all color.

And with every footstep

the harden pavement streets

measure a walker's interior

giving nothing back

but quiet interlude.

Somewhere between evening's

arrival and nighttime's descent

a settling presence morphs

into being and pulse.

Awakening fading daylight

to evening's dreams and hopes,

alongside the trafficked

glitter and glow of

a reviving cityscape.

No longer mute it's tones

and voiceless speech,

ever listening, sensing,

feeling, absorbing.

Birthing a shared,

but waking humanity,

held in the rhythm

of lifting heels

to passing souls.

R.E. Slater

January 28, 2026

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications
all rights reserved

Notes

The sample paintings below explore the city not as a fixed structure, but as a living atmosphere - an ever-shifting field of light, shadow, movement, and interior states. Working within an Impressionistic–Tonalist approach to Urban Expressionism, they prioritize mood and emotional resonance over precise representation. Forms are suggested rather than defined; figures remain anonymous, allowing viewers to enter the scene without narrative prescription. Wet pavement, softened architecture, and glowing traffic lights become conduits for memory, transience, and quiet endurance, shaping a city that feels sensed more than seen.

The goal is not to describe a specific place, but to evoke a shared, often unspoken experience of moving through urban space at twilight, where the external world mirrors inner weather. Through softened forms and luminous washes, the city becomes a reflective space where movement, anonymity, and quiet presence converge. Rather than documenting a place frozen in time, these works seek to hold a moment of being.

City Lights Collection

T. S. Eliot, Preludes, Section 1

The winter evening settles down

With smell of steaks in passageways.

Six o’clock.

The burnt-out ends of smoky days.

And now a gusty shower wraps

The grimy scraps

Of withered leaves about your feet

And newspapers from vacant lots;

The showers beat

On broken blinds and chimney-pots,

And at the corner of the street

A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

And then the lighting of the lamps.

Themes: Urban dusk, fragmentation, inward loneliness, muted beauty inside decay.

Link: https://poets.org/poem/preludes

---

Carl Sandburg, Chicago

Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted

    women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.

And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the

    gunman kill and go free to kill again.

And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and

    children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.

And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city,

    and I give them back the sneer and say to them:

Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive

    and coarse and strong and cunning.

Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold

    slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;

Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted

    against the wilderness,
   Bareheaded,

   Shoveling,

   Wrecking,

   Planning,

   Building, breaking, rebuilding,

Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,

Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,

Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,

Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs

    the heart of the people,

                   Laughing!

Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked,

    sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player

    with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.

Theme: Sandburg treats the city as muscular, tired, alive, imperfect.

Link: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/12840/chicago

---

Frank O’Hara, The Day Lady Died

Theme: Not visually similar, but emotionally adjacent: walking through the city, noticing ordinary things, carrying quiet grief. Gives a sense of moving through crowds while inwardly being elsewhere.

Link: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42657/the-day-lady-died

---

Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen

Theme: Melancholy urban beauty, fleeting figures, modern solitude.

Link: https://poets.org/poem/spleen

---

Rainer Maria Rilke, Evening

The bleak fields are asleep,

My heart alone wakes;

The evening in the harbour

Down his red sails takes.

Night, guardian of dreams,

Now wanders through the land;

The moon, a lily white,

Blossoms within her hand.

Theme: Rilke’s dusk poems often treat evening as a threshold between worlds.

Link: https://poets.org/poem/evening-3

---

Federico García Lorca, City That Does Not Sleep

(and other city poems from Poet in New York)

Themes: Urban dreaminess, emotional pressure, surreal light against darkness.

Link: https://poets.org/poem/city-does-not-sleep

---

Illustration by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT based on Niaz Hannan's painting above. Other similar styles
can be found in: Leonid Afremov's "Twilight Rain in the City" and E.J. Paprocki's, "Rainy Evening."

City Lights Spectres

Rain gathers the city unto itself.

Lights loosen their golden halos.
People pass like unfinished sentences,

upon the glowing streets.

Somewhere between grey and gold,

the evening begins to breathe,

and so do its passing vestiges,

phantomed spectres of the night.

R.E. Slater

January 28, 2026

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications
all rights reserved

Painter Edward Hopper often echoes the same emotional register as the poets listed above; presenting quiet figures, urban isolation, soft light, suspended time. Many poets have been influenced by Hopper to write in his painted tones.

Edward Hopper Paintings

link here

Additional City Lights Paintings

by various artists

link here