Editor’s note: Airstream will host a fine art invitational exhibit of landscape art, May 31-June 5, at its headquarters in Jackson Center. This is one a series of stories that will profile the artists whose work will be shown.

SIDNEY — After looking at his artwork, a viewer might think Stephen Fox, of Brooklyn, New York, is a third-shift painter.

His subjects are the creatures of the night: eerily lit phone booths, people defined by shadow, midnight strollers, cows caught in a headlight’s passing beam, cars at the drive-in theater, moored boats silhouetted by village lights onshore.

Fox’s night is not scary, however. The moments he captures are not creepy. Instead, his darkness — gently glowing rather than pierced with multiple, sometimes tiny sources of light — is comfortable, inviting.

“I remember when, as a child, I was afraid of the dark, and I remember when it became intriguing,” Fox said.

Going out after sundown can’t guarantee a painting, however. As Fox explores nighttime haunts, he doesn’t know what he’ll find.

“Sometimes I don’t find anything. The light is good, the moon is full, but there’s no magic,” he said. He takes photographs during his explorations and works with them on the computer, rather like using sketches, to compose the paintings.

“Or I have a sense of something, so (the art is) both found out in the world — a jump start —,” he noted, and from his imagination. Sometimes, he gets a bit of assistance from his wife, Alicia, also an artist.

“We’re really different in the way that we work. I work more abstractly. But there’s something in what we do that relates. We’ve always shared looking at each other’s work, going ‘Hmmmm, that doesn’t quite work,” Alicia said. “I’ll see something that doesn’t work with color. I tend to look at compositions differently from what he does. I’ll see certain things that he doesn’t see because I’m coming in with fresh eyes. Sometimes he listens to me. Sometimes he doesn’t.”

“It’s a process that is different every time,” Fox noted. “I’m aware that I’m not just painting stuff. There’s some subtle thinking in my psyche. It’s inevitable that something of the artist is in there. Art cannot lie. If I’m really inspired, it’s there in the painting,” Fox said.

He draws viewers into his pictures, encouraging them to feel what he feels, see what he’s seen.

“Are you going to be there at 3 in the morning?” he asks rhetorically. “No. But I will be there. I like being there — in the fog, in the mist. I’m comfortable in my own skin when I’m there. Some of that is in the painting.”

While his viewers may not be out in the wee hours, peacekeepers are. Fox has had encounters with police and homeland security officials as he tramps through otherwise deserted areas of hill and dale. But that doesn’t stop him from finding the right place in the right moment, finding something he says is “worthy of being witnessed.”

His sharing of that witness doesn’t come fast. It takes Fox a long time to complete a painting. And as he shares the image, he adds light.

“(The artworks) are never as dark as what I see,” he said. “I have the opportunity to be a theater scenic or lighting designer by exposing something differently or putting something there that wasn’t there. I get to decide the rules. There’s an element I consciously cultivate and that’s a bit of mystery. They tend to be very quiet paintings”

There’s art and then there’s art. The work of some artists can be seen, absorbed, understood by a viewer all at once. Fox calls that fast art. Other pieces are so nuanced that people find something new, something more, with every viewing. Collectors say the latter applies to Fox’s work.

“I call them slow paintings. It’s how I respond to life. So maybe life is kind of slow. Passage through life is kind of slow. It feels right that that should be in the painting,” he said. “A lot of work now is by subject. I look at art history and Rembrandt (for instance) was exploring in a lot of different ways.”

Fox, too, doesn’t limit himself to traditional landscapes. His body of work comprises cityscapes, seascapes, portraits — although he doesn’t think of them as portraits — and figures. Recently, he has begun a series of paintings that include black and white images on a drive-in movie screen. Sometimes, the “movies” are from Fox’s imagination. Sometimes they are from recognizable films.

The piece he plans to exhibit in the Airstream Fine Art Invitational, “The Light of an Uncertain World,” has “Casablanca” on the screen. The painting is about the whole environment, not what’s on the screen, but Fox uses the screen to make a subtle statement to his viewers.

“I started this one in February,” he said. “I’m listening to the (presidential) campaign. The country is in a very strange place. I know that some of that is in the painting. Ingrid Bergman is looking out with a scared face. It’s a place in the movie where the Nazis are coming. That’s not the point of the painting, but it’s in there.”

He says on his website, www.stephenfoxart.com, that the elements in his work “can have both literal and symbolic significance, worlds of form and spirit given voice at the same time.” “Giving voice” sounds literary. The artist admits to also being a writer.

“I keep that close to the vest. I’ve done some creative writing. I’m unpublished,” Fox said. “It’s become part of my process in a way.”

He uses writing as a break from painting.

“I come back (to the canvas) feeling refreshed. I love playing with language,” he said. That’s evident in the titles he gives his artworks, titles that direct a viewer’s perception through the use of puns, irony and wit.

But the artist/writer has to search for words to describe why, could he own any piece of art ever created, he’d choose Jan Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring.”

“There would be other paintings by Vermeer. I certainly wouldn’t mind that I don’t get that one, (that) I get this other Vermeer,” he joked. “Vermeer is the artist that, when I first saw his artwork in person, it’s just uhhhhhhhhh. I don’t know the words for that. It’s not lust. It’s not just admiration. There’s a definite response to the way he saw light and captured light. It’s like taking the world around him and finding profound beauty and stillness.”

“The Girl with a Pearl Earring” is exhibited in the Mauritshuis, an art museum in the Netherlands. People wait in line to see it.

“You waited and waited and you got your moment, your 20 seconds, with the painting. I went and got back at the end of the line again,” Fox said. “How can something that simple say so much? Why do I feel like I’m in front of a sacred object? Why is this touching my soul?

“There have been just a few times when there was something going on between me and a painting,” Fox added. “Seeing that painting is a confirmation of what’s possible.”