Late at night I really enjoy reading in bed. And when I get really sleepy I just want to flip the light and go to sleep. For many months in my Florida house I would get out of bed and walk across the room to flip the light and walk back to bed.  I finally got a lot of pleasure by having a trusty clamp lamp just sitting there on the bed next to me...I have been living alone too so there is no one to balk about it.

One of the things I am adamant about in composition is to have interesting things and shapes going on in the corners--it gives me such an incredible happy feeling to have that interest going on throughout the canvas. I think, here too, there is a nod to Rembrandt.

Formally, I would call this type of painting an oil sketch. I made it in the same period I was making many plein air oil paintings, landscapes out of doors by natural light. For the landscapes one must work very quickly, I try to "get" it in under an hour. Here I painted it up in about 2 hours. But I couldn't be more delighted with it.