Isolating how I “think” about the painting
The painting is progressing beautifully. I am painting the background from the top down, which is true, but what I am really doing is working from the areas furthest back, which happen to be at the top. I will work my way down toward the bottom, and the bottom is where the spatial objects closest to us will be. I will save the figure for last. Even though half her body will be in shadow, that shadow will be completely or almost completely transparent. The nebula background will move through her transparent self.
Today I am sharing my thoughts about the painting, elsewhere I discuss how I feel about it, and the visual science behind its color theory. While I am painting I drift between extreme emotions, conscious thoughts, and analytical visual perception.
In the area I have painted, there will be about 50 stars of different sizes, luminosity, and spatial relationships. Each one will be painted slightly differently from the others. I am placing dots of brilliance ranging from dim and muted by space dust to cold and crisp brightness. I will also be placing them through space, so even though the top area is the more distant background, the individual stars will be placed throughout that range.
Before I get to the stars, I need to make smoother transitions in the different hues and tones of the space nebula. The smoother the transitions, the more punch the stars will have. If the background is too painterly, with a lot of visible marks, the stars will not show up because the harshness of the painted strokes would stand out too much. When the background is smoothed, the stars will pop.
I have a technique for smoothing out the light and tone of the space dust. In the dark areas, I smooth by making the inside of the dark slightly darker, which creates a kind of inverted glow. For the lit parts, I lighten the inside of the lighter areas, which creates a feeling of glow. Then I make the edges more diffused. It is a useful technique, though students do not like learning it. They want to paint a thing, like an apple, but this technique of making the inside of a dark area progressively darker, or the inside of a light area progressively lighter, is powerful. It is just hard to learn in the abstract. I will find a video I made on it and show it to you. I will talk more about this in the future.
I really like the pose of Eve. In some ways, it is mostly what it is not. It is not a come on. It is not coquettish. There is a fine line here. She has her weight on her right leg, and her left leg is relaxed, and there is a fine line between thrusting out her right butt cheek and hip, which could look like a come on, and it looking unselfconsciously natural. That unselfconscious natural look is what I think fits Eve. As the painting progresses, we will see how well I capture that.
There are no tattoos and no clothing elements. There are no ribbons in her hair or jewelry. There is nothing in the space nebula that indicates a time. This is my way of avoiding the trap of dating a painting. When you clothe figures or add something like a cell phone, it dates the work. I want this to be timeless and universal … mythical.
With the atmosphere of this nebula, I am trying to create a messy chaos of primordial forces. The space dust is a kind of rust orange red that reminds me of dried blood. It gives a feeling of how biological functions and reproduction are messy and predate civilized dating rituals.
She is slightly off center in the composition. This complements the second painting, which will be Adam, and the two are meant to go together. Both figures are nudged slightly toward the center. Eve will be on the left and Adam on the right, and both are moving slightly toward each other in the compositions. Essentially I am also saying that humanity is the center of the universe. Their size is meant to be obviously prominent. The nebula and the universe are the background, a kind of drum roll for humanity as the star.
Michael, Idyllwild, November 22, 2025.
Michael Newberry 