Translucent Luminosity
DETAILS
Medium — Oil on panel, glazing technique
Format — Nine 2 × 2 ft panels, painted as one 6 × 6 ft surface
Year — 2016
Origin — Final project, Painting, Raritan Valley Community College
Process — Citrus sliced and backlit on a silk screen, photographed, converted to x-ray reference sheets in Photoshop
The assignment had one rule: paint from life, or from a photograph of something you composed in real life. No found images.
So I built the subject. I bought oranges, lemons, limes, and a blood orange, sliced them as thin as I could get them, and laid them across a silk screen with a bright light underneath. Backlit, a citrus slice stops being a piece of fruit. The membranes go transparent. The pulp reads as structure — chambers, veins, a system.
I was looking at x-ray photography at the time, and at artists working at the boundary between the macro and the microscopic. In Photoshop I pulled my own photographs into high-contrast x-ray versions and printed them as reference sheets, so I could see exactly where the density lived before I ever mixed a color.
The painting is oil, built in glazes — thin transparent layers, one over the next, each one waiting on the last to dry. It's the slowest way to do it. It's also the only way to get light to sit behind the paint instead of on top of it. That's where the glow comes from.
Nine two-foot panels, painted as a single continuous six-foot surface.
Where it began
