Miles Davis
American, 1926–1991
Bill Evans
American, 1929–1980
Blue in Green (1959)
Recommended recording: Kind of Blue, Miles Davis, trumpet; John Coltrane, tenor saxophone; Bill Evans, piano; Paul Chambers, double bass; Jimmy Cobb, drums (Columbia, 1959)
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Georgia O’Keeffe
American, 1887–1986
Radiator Building—Night, New York (1927)
Oil on canvas
Carl Van Vechten Gallery, Fisk University, Nashville (co-owned by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas)
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Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Imagine this setting: It is late at night in New York City, perhaps in the summertime. You sit on a balcony, alone, your thoughts drifting as you gaze into distant neon lights and the dark night sky. The air is warm and still; traffic hums faintly below; steam rises from the streets—a rare hush seems to have fallen over the city.
This atmosphere—quiet, lingering, introspective—is captured in both O’Keeffe’s Radiator Building—Night, New York and Davis and Evans’s Blue in Green. Both works use structure (visual or musical) to create a sense of suspended time—an experience of stillness that is not static, but quietly cyclical and meditative.
O’Keeffe’s painting presents a pared-down vision of the Manhattan skyline at night, one that foregrounds stillness and restraint. The composition centers on the American Radiator Building in Midtown, rendered from a vantage point that isolates it against the background and sky. Faint lights from neighboring buildings and wisps of steam from a rooftop enhance the painting’s atmospheric mood. A red neon sign bears the name of O’Keeffe’s husband, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz.
O’Keeffe removes the visual noise of the streets and instead focuses attention on the building’s geometric structure. Her palette is dominated by cool blues and blacks, punctuated by warmly illuminated windows that contrast the external quiet of the night with the suggestion of interior life. The absence of street-level detail, together with the building’s repetitive grid of windows, creates a sense of suspended time.
Although the painting is intelligible as a cityscape, O’Keeffe pushes it toward abstraction. The Radiator Building is recognizable but stripped of intricate detail, essentially rendering a geometry of light and shadow; the painting is less a representation of the building than a meditation on the city late at night. This approach reflects O’Keeffe’s Precisionist style, which distilled industrial and urban subjects into their essential geometric forms, lending the work a machine-age clarity that feels at once realistic and dreamlike.
If O’Keeffe achieves this effect through visual reduction, Davis and Evans arrive at it through harmonic design. Blue in Green, credited to Davis but widely believed to have been composed primarily (or entirely) by Evans, unfolds over an irregular ten-measure cycle that is tonal yet harmonically indeterminate, gravitating toward D minor and A minor while resisting conventional closure.
Rather than arriving at a satisfying cadence at the end of each cycle, the progression deflects resolution and loops forward. The result is a harmonic structure that seems to have no beginning and no end, thus denying the listener any sense of arrival.
The texture and timbre of the ensemble—from the coloristic chords in the piano to the delicate shimmer of the brushed snare drum—enhance the composition’s sense of weightlessness. The muted trumpet solos (0:18–1:47 and 3:32–4:56 in the Kind of Blue recording) are stark and lyrical, utilizing long, sustained notes and hushed scalar figures, while the tenor saxophone solo (2:26–3:09) is more animated, adding warmth and emotional intensity to the middle section of the piece.
Just as O’Keeffe establishes a feeling of spatial stillness, Davis and Evans create a sense of temporal suspension. The cyclical structure of the piece produces a sensation of returning and revisiting rather than progressing toward a definitive endpoint. This circularity, framed by the composition’s harmonic design, gives the music a meditative quality in which ideas emerge, dissolve, and reappear.
In moments like the one imagined at the outset—sitting alone on a balcony in New York City late at night, your thoughts wandering—the grind of daily life evaporates, giving way to something quieter and more elusive. In our modern world, such moments feel increasingly rare. Yet the Radiator Building painting and Blue in Green make this quality of suspended time accessible, not by simply depicting it, but by reenacting it. To immerse oneself in these works is, in some sense, to escape the noisy commotion of the daytime, step out into the warmth of the glistening night—and exhale.
© 2026 Troy Etter