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