Thursday, March 25, 2010

More Apples

It's taken me a while to get back to those apples, fortunately they haven't completely rotted. In fact, they've developed a wonderful patina of colors that I've been working hard to try and capture. This paintings been a bit of an experiment as I've been trying out different lighting setups. My normal arrangement is to shine a spotlight on the still life while my easel is placed under two four foot long flourescent bulbs. One cool (bluish) and one warm (pinkish), This time I decided to try working under the same light as the still life so that I could match the colors exactly. Using a spot light on the easel proved to be too glaring so I went back under the flourescents but I added a 25 watt candescent clip-on lamp. I like the way the colors look on the easel, but I'm not sure that that's the way they would be lit in a gallery setting or home. It's not that I've been unhappy with the way that my paintings have been coming out, it's just that I've been reading a lot of munsell based color theory lately and it's got me questioning some of my basic assumptions. For instance, in this painting I was thinking a lot more about chroma than usual and I used some neutral value mixtures to lower the chroma rather than earth colors which is my usual way. The other problem is photographing the work. When I work under the flourescents the photos come out great but when I use the incandescent and then photograph using the flourescents alone, horrible. This photo was taken using the light that I was working under(flourescents and incandescent) and the colors look pretty close but I'm getting glare. I'll figure it out eventually. One thing that I'm realizing is that the painting and still life don't necessarily have to be made under the same light, the painting just has to match what I'm seeing, however it's lit. I'll see how things work out when I'm all finished.

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