Lockdown changed us. It changed how we think about our work, our domestic space, our relationships, and ourselves. It also raised questions about the city and who it is for, and allowed us to see situations in a new light – whether that be public space, amount of traffic, or the value of greenery.

For musician and artist Darren Hayman, it also allowed him to see a new dark. “The night paintings came about during the lockdown and my last dog walk of each day,” he says of a series of small paintings he has made over the last few years and can be seen in a new book and short-run exhibition.


Rectangles of windows and doors shine from the blackness, but devoid of people they read as scenes from an uncast movie. But Hayman knows there are lives inside: “there seemed to be a two way envy – I was envious of the people inside behind their windows, in the warm, but were they envious of me on the outside?” Perhaps he saw the people but edited them out once home with his paints, perhaps they fell into the fog of anonymity afforded by the city.

But the inhabitants are present, if not in body through their belongings and appropriation of space. A pot plant sits on a balcony. A garden ornament is lit from a porch light. Clothes seem to be hanging in a window. “In an architectural sense, the paintings immediately concern our living environments – it  made me consider the use of balconies, gardens, and different approaches to curtains and nettings, and how that is affected by class and type of building.” Edward Hopper seems to be transposed into urban South London’s postwar blocks and converted Victorian houses, without the bodies but with lives equally as silent.



“Something I liked about these paintings is that I both was and wasn't painting the buildings,” says Hayman, also a singer and songwriter. He was formerly in the band Hefner and now works solo, crafting songs and albums which frequently speak to the built environment and history of place. Lidos, suburban homes, thankful villages, lidos, and parks populate his lyrics. Alongside a reproduction of each painting in his self-published book (details below) is a single line, perhaps a lyric yet to meet its tune, or a poetic line searching for a couplet.

In Hefner, Hayman wrote album We Love The City (2000). In the title track, of the same name, he tells us of city love, and perhaps a longing present in these paintings: