Spirit Vase

 Spirit Vessel is another view inside my home. Title I made up after the piece was done. And that vase on the right, well, it’s interesting as a spirit vessel and peace, someone had said that, “Hey, your house looks like a mausoleum,” and I kind of like that. That vase is really quite a bit larger than that.

I shrank it down proportionately for this painting. It did, and it gave a, you know, counterbalance for all that light on the left. One thing I do when I paint these scenes is I think it’s my duty as a human being on this world to make things more interesting than they really are. And when I painted this, the light was never this interesting in terms of a glow.

So I exaggerate the feeling of glow ’cause I like it. And that means, you know, basically darkening the top and the bottom and letting the center of it be as bright as possible. And it’s the way I’ve painted a lot of these works because it’s something that approach to pictures that has been going on at least since the 17th century and it worked, it still works.

It’s something that you see it in cinema all the time and you see it in commercial and fine art photography and I like it. It’s a romantic life. It’s a heightened reality. And really much of the time, reality is pretty prosaic and it’s not interesting enough. So that’s why I like it.