St. Thomas’s Eve

This painting depicts the road to Werner Berg’s farm on a clear and frosty winter night. The tree trunks cast shadows in the moonlight. The narrow road, which is seen from above in the foreground, leads into the image’s depth, while a second vanishing point is created by the shadows of the trees converging toward the light source. In the upper right hand section of the painting, individual spatial layers are defined by tree trunks, branches, horizontal patches of shadow and the woods in the background.

Usually Werner Berg’s landscapes combine spatial layering with elements extending into the space, such as roads, train tracks, ice surfaces or fences. An ambivalence between layered space and perspective space is achieved by the objects leading in perspective from the foreground into the depth. The combination of these two approaches to depicting the picture space is found throughout Werner Berg’s entire oeuvre, and it is typical of a significant part of the iconography.