Sunday, January 29, 2012

Illuminating Conversations

Illuminating Conversations, oil on panel, 6"X6" -R.L. Delight
Here is my recent painting! It is as finished as I intend to make it. It took a lot longer than I thought it would and, as I have mentioned in the previous post, I learned a lot along the way. One of the biggest things I learned was more in the nature of a reminder. It reminded me how important drawing is. I didn't start this painting with a drawing, nor do I believe that all my paintings need to start with a drawing. I do believe that with this one I should have. I am going to try an experiment on tomorrow's still life set up. I am going to do a small painting of part of the composition, a larger painting of the total composition, and a crayon drawing of the composition for a show that I agreed to do. I will be talking about the crayon drawings a while later in another post. With the larger composition, I will be doing a drawing and going through a more traditional process. I am going to use the small painting as a kind of warm up to loosen things up as well.
I am still pretty new at this and have a lot to learn!
A little bit about the subject of the painting. I found the light bulb on one of my beach walks last year. It is fairly large and I believe it came off a ship. It still has a bit of seawater in it I was unable to remove. The vintage movie camera I picked up at a thrift store. I liked the idea of old time ways to light our world in the face of the current reality of LEDs, florescent bulbs, Ipods, Ipads, and digital cameras. As I was painting them the objects looked to me like they were having a conversation. I had particularly positioned the camera so that it looked like it was looking toward the viewer. I didn't start out with a big story on this, just the idea.
In other areas of the studio, I asked my mate to build a simple rendition of a photo cube. We got wood dowels and he made some blocks that attach at the ends to form corners. Sort of like a giant Tinker Toy cube. I found a polyester white  shower curtain liner at the thrift store and set it up to take the above photo. Here is a picture of the apparatus:
The white liner is peeled back to show the corners. I used two clamp lights outside of the cube at either side with daylight florescent bulbs and put the camera on a tripod. Not perfect but it does work. Space is at a premium so I made it to be able to take it apart and store it neatly. The downside is that I have to set it up every time I need to take a picture. It will do until I can afford a better set up.
With the next painting, I will be moving more toward storytelling. I am working steadily in the studio and that makes me very happy. Until Wednesday, -Renee

4 comments:

Theresa said...

You know I got DH a folding white screen set up for pics of his stuff and I know it wasn't overly expensive.
I'll try to find it again.

BTW, I missed the last post, love the beach painting.
I don't know what my sentence is, but I do love the one about eating tomato soup with a fork! :)

R. Delight said...

Hi Theresa, actually a photo tent is not that expensive, relatively. They run anywhere from about $25 on up. At the moment, I am watching every penny I spend, prioritizing, and really trying to buy less stuff. I will be able to get a tent soon as I determined that it will add good value but I wanted to try to make do until then. It works for now! I am also starting another purge of stuff soon as I need to clear space for the important things in my life. Thanks for the thoughtfulness!

Karen Martin Sampson said...

This reminds me of the box I recently built to pose a model in...since mine doesn't come apart easily I am currently stuck with it taking up a lot of space in my studio until I can finally get a date that will work for both the model and me! We have tried twice to get it together for a photo shoot and stuff just keeps getting in the way of it happening (like illness, weather, etc.). Using it as a box for set ups is a great notion but I'd have to place it somewhere more out of the way. Will give this some thought. I very much like your still life!

R. Delight said...

Karen, I have been reading about your model in a box and am looking forward to seeing the painting develop! I am trying to work with blogger on issues of not being able to leave comments on some blogs. Apparently others have had this issue too. Thank you for the comment! I am learning so much and am always inspired by you and the many other wonderful artists who have been working at this longer.

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