My tomato crop (4 plants) yielded two (2) super ass lame tomatoes. I'm almost embarrassed to call myself a Southerner. I killed a hydrangea and two gardenia plants from neglect. While bushwhacking I caught poison oak or ivy and am certain I transferred the urushiol onto the chin strap of my motorcycle helmet. I finally took the liner out yesterday and thoroughly washed it, dousing the chin strap in Tecnu®. Sap is covering my car because my studio is my garage. I would suck at true homesteading. I would also suck at bomb squad duty. I am rewiring a lamp. It looked easy enough until I got to the part where I'm supposed to tell the difference between the hot and the neutral wire. No can do. There are no ridges, and for the life of me they are the same color. I've been invited to a friend's studio tonight. There will be chili and everyone will be casually be working on their own thing. I'm bringing some watercolors to work on. I may break down and bring the lamp.
Until I install proper lighting, I have placed table lamps in strategic places in the studio. Cozy, yes, and I am only a handful of bulbs shy of having the entire house, inside and out, on energy saving bulbs. Yesterday, while at Lowe's®, I almost bought a shop light but couldn't figure out the difference between the $10 lamp and the $14 lamp. Normally, I'd opt for the obviously cheap one without further ado, but I asked the guy with the name tag and smart uniform what the difference was. He stated the obvious- four dollars. Aside from that, he said one took a larger bulb- another rather brilliant observation— and just in case I was totally blind, he pointed out that one had a black hood, and the other had a white hood. I dug a little deeper for the difference between the larger bulb and smaller bulb, but nope, no real difference. Sensing I was having a hard time making up my mind, he all but laughed and said he had the $10 lamp at home, and it worked just fine. He moved on. I am a label reader. I scoured the box for anything informative and noticed the black one had an electronic ballast and the white one, a magnetic ballast. Unfortunately there was no information stating what this really meant, and and I didn't want to suffer through an answer like, "one's electronic and the other isn't," so I walked back to the paint department to pick up my can of something-close-to-ceiling-white to touch up a patch on the bedroom ceiling. I don't mean to be hyper critical, but after googling the terms
electronic ballast and magnetic ballast and immediately finding this, it seems a home improvement store might want to point out that the electronic ballast is more energy efficient and cost less to operate. Seriously. Lowe's get points for being less crowded, and having the cheaper unit, but it's twice as far of a drive as Home Depot®, so not sure where I will be buying my shop light. I do need better lighting in my studio though.
My lighting is all over the place.
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| My view every morning when I have coffee. Not sure about the warm lighting. |
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| Ambient lighting in the studio. |
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| I think I am done with this one. Damn, that means it needs a title, pronto. |
No, upon further inspection, I am not finished with it. I need to tweak the color behind the Shriner-Treeman and Fake Cousin Itt's hair. I am loathe to admit I concern myself with such pedestrian formalist matters, but I do. And for the record, that's not really a Shriner or Cousin Itt.
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I am still working on this one, I think. If not, it was a really quick painting, and you know how I feel about those.
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3 comments:
hmm, lighting. I had large florescent tubes overhead in my old space. One tube was Daylight florescent and one was a Warm White florescent. I also had two incandescent spotlights and a regular incandescent 6o W bulb in a photo flood stand. Along with the piddling light from the window this was a fine mix. Now, I think the ceiling here is too low for a large florescent flxture and I have just the bulbs in a regular overhead fixture ..one "daylight" and one "warm white" along with the mix of warm and cool incandescent in the photo floods at 100 W each.
I'm finding the floods a little glary on the paint surface here and am trying to figure out how to fix that.
Otherwise there is lots of light and I like the mixed warm (the warm white bulbs/tubes) and cool (the daylight florescent and daylight incandescent). I don't know a thing about the ballast and also I am worried now about what I heard about the "dirty" electricity from florescent bulbs, ack!
Is this crazy? Staple something white (sheet? paper?) on your ceiling, get a quartz light stand with two lamps, shine them up on the ceiling. Or paint the ceiling white. I don't like direct ilght shining down.
The top painting reminds me of something really rooted in old world culture.
At first glance I thought the bottom painting, the lamp, was a Francis Bacon study.
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