Steeped in noir, as visceral and real as a photograph or a frame plucked from a black-and-white film, the rich monochrome charcoal works of Eric Nash draw the viewer into a quintessentially Los Angeles world.

While not a native of the city, Nash has embraced it with his incredibly detailed drawings, creating intimate impressions of the city he has called home for 25 years. In “Night Drawings,” the artist’s latest solo exhibition, the city hums to life after dark, pulling the viewer along on a fabulous freeway ride past iconic signs and landmarks. 

Each piece captures a mysterious glow. In Hollywood Blvd. (all works 2023), Nash gives us a freeway sign lit with headlights and shadow. It serves as a billboard advertising the famous street in the city, illuminated by illusion, making it a place of movie-star dreams and a simmering foreboding. In Dance, a full moon shines like a giant pearl above a gleaming sign, inviting its viewers to get in step. It is a command as much as a request, exerting its own gravitational pull, just like that moon.

The Cactus offers another illuminated sign, this one rimmed in neon, advocating for the “The Best Tacos” against an inky black velvet sky.

Eric Nash, Los Altos, 2023. Courtesy of KP Projects.

Neon embraces a graceful sign for “Los Altos Hotel & Apts” in Los Altos, the words floating dreamily from a scaffolding atop a building. The night sky is not so dark here, brightened by city lights and soft clouds. 

But most of Nash’s skyscapes are dark and deep—a bottomless soft void—plush and compelling. If it wasn’t for the illuminated signs and streetlights, one could fall into that night and never climb out.

Midnight Oasis underscores this point; an island floating in the darkness, two gas station pumps positioned beneath a service island roof, empty, spotlit, waiting to pull in travelers driving through the dark like moths to a flame. 

Framed by the impossibly dark sky, Night Waters offers a liquid depth—a corner of a swimming pool glows from a light on its rim, shining an eerie welcome, a ghost of water, silvery and cool.

“Night Drawings” is in part remarkable for its superb mastery of craft, as Nash renders images so perfectly that they appear photographed, not drawn, at first glance. Working consistently within the boundaries of 30 x 44 in. paper, the artist’s latest series creates indelible images of light within darkness.

Borrowing from Hollywood film and fiction history, Nash is the Raymond Chandler of visual art; he creates iconic drawings that imprint on the viewer as much as their real-life counterparts imprint on the darkness itself, with pools of seductive light. 

To enter the artist’s world in this exhibition is to plunge into a nightscape both entirely realistic and surreal, and experience a fierce depth of love for this city of often-lost night dreams.