Moonlit Room

A while back, I posted about a painting in which I was experimenting with starting fires on top of wet paint.  The intense heat of lighter fluid burning in pools on top of the paint made the acrylic sort of curdle.  The panel looked terrible but I loved the texture.

'Moonlit Room' Jason Randolph Burrell: 2011 
Acrylic on Wood Panel: 18" x 9"

So I decided to continue forward with the piece a couple of weeks ago when my good friend Katie was visiting.  More than once over the past few months she's inspired me.  But then, that's what she does, being a professional muse. And damn good at it.

Originally when I was setting it on fire, this was meant to be a painting of the cage I was often kept in as a kid.  I was ramping up at the time to do a big project about imprisonment which I eventually abandoned (postponed?).  Since that time, I've been feeling increasingly as if maybe the way things worked out is actually allowing me to more fully explore the feelings of solitude to which the cage of my childhood first introduced me than I might have been able to had the project, as originally intended, panned out.

Detail of 'Moonlit Room'

Of the original painting, all that can now be seen is what shows through the window.  In this space, you can see the bubbles the curdling effect had on the blue and white paint, as well as the bare wood (stained slightly from a combination of watered-down black paint and smoke).  The moonlight shining into the room is actually the product of intense heat- like  the sunlight reflected off the moon.

The window is the last remaining evidence that this was once a painting of a cage.  The room itself does not exist.  Nor do any of the other things I've placed in the room.  While reminiscent of the space in which I actually live, this is definitely not meant to be a literal representation of it.  There's a significance to each item in the room, but it's of primary importance to remember that none of them is real.

While painting this piece I was imagining myself laying on the floor looking up at the effects of moonlight on a room while being unable to see the moon itself.  Much like we can't actually see the fire which made this painting possible or the sun at night, or hear what people say about us when we're not there, the unknown and the fleeting are often relevant.