Begining at the begining....

I went to my studio today and started playing with my new lighting set up. As I said in my previous post that I was concerned about the lighting in my artwork not being dramatic enough to convey the emotion as set up in my compositions. I decided to start from the start and re-work one of my old compositions Cultural Cringe (the image that appeared on the front cover of Trouble magazine - Dec 2010). 

I re-set the figures in nearly the same pose as before. I am happy with the new body I placed on the figure of me. It has far more articulation than the previous body and I can achieve more naturalistic poses than before. In a previous version of Cultural Cringe, the figure of me holds an armful of dolls, this time I chose only one, the message conveyed is the same. The Hulk and Thing figures are posed closer (more threatening?) to the Neale figure. I lit the scene with the MacGyvered snoot and placed the scrim - a doily on a frame between the light source and the figures (see above). I am really happy with the resulting image that came out of the shoot. I feel there is more emotive tension in the scene. The 'wow' factor for me is that in the depiction of the 'Neale doll', the figure has taken on another degree of realism than my previous versions of the image.

Now I have somewhat sorted the lighting issue, there are some of my old images that I will revisit. There are some that I will forget about entirely and I am sure that there will be more new work on the horizon. Should I tread over old ground? As this body of work is part of my Masters of Fine Art, I feel that  part of my 'research' is the artwork I have produced in the past and the experiments have been made with some success and some failures. Now may be the time to consolidate my research and start  producing some results.