Fall decorating will be with us before I can blink, a painting takes me a while to work out and execute and dry and make little changes .. so I have wanted to do some fall still lifes for years and never manage it! Christmas overtakes me while I am still just thinking about pumpkins. So yesterday I began to imagine what I might paint, I love the blue corn of Taos, actually have some seeds from Robert Mirabal but never planted them. The fun of corn husks is unbounded, it can be whatever one imagines! I have a Taos flute, and a wonderful small drum made about 40 years ago by Red Shirt, a Taos Pueblo drum maker of note. Tonight I have sketched a possible arrangement.
I need a huge cardboard box, or some hinged cardboard pieces like the side of a box, to contain the light and make nice shadows and set up a clip-on light. Then I will have to work in a slightly dark room with a light above my easel and my chair and paints and on and on, setting this up in a front bedroom, have to move in a long white work table and shove the sofa over, keeping paint off the bed coverlet and little sofa with plastic covers, and so forth. This is how I have done my big still life paintings in the past, and why there have not been many for years now.
My tiny and crowded library where I normally paint from pictures on a screen is intact and ready to use at all times, wonder what I can do to bypass the difficult set up described above. Photos never catch all the precious reflected colors in the shadows, and reflected light off nearby objects, nor allow one to slightly move this or that over without messing up the shadows. Still I may end up setting the box up at night on my back porch and taking pictures of it. Then paint off my monitor instead of much preferred life.
