Radiating Moonlight

 

I did a radiating moonlight painting kind of as a comparison to my radiating sunset. The sunset painting used a baobab tree and an elephant, whereas this one uses a pine tree and two foxes. So both have three factors: point of light, foliage, and animal.

I think a lot of people will see wolves when they look at this, because in our society wolves are associated with the full moon. However, foxes are on my list of animals I associate with, while wolves are not, which is why I went with what I did. Foxes are nocturnal too, so it's not unrealistic to see them out at night.

The animals aren't as much the focus in this one as in the sunset, because here the light dims at the edges and so anything closer to the edge is less in focus, making the foxes more like "flavour". The real star of the show is the pine tree, because it "interrupts" the moon by being one of the darkest objects meeting the lightest point.

For the sunset I used a long, horizontal canvas, because I wanted to show the sun, baobab, and elephant separately to kind of guide the eye and force a size comparison. For this one, I wanted everything closer to the point of light to increase visibility, so I went for a more symmetrical look with a square canvas.

Just like with the sunset, I made my animal silhouettes too large in comparison to the tree. You can imagine them closer to the camera if you like, but I still should have made them smaller.

I did the tree first and wondered if I should add the animals. With just the tree it had kind of a lonely and quiet feeling to it, which kind of works for a night piece. But it felt kind of empty and I still wanted to add a little life to it for some reason, so I went with this.

I don't want to just do points of light and silhouettes forever. It looks good but feels like a bit of a cheap trick if overdone. However, the fact that this just uses one colour, creating a sense of distance from the point of light, while the sunset had a flatter look with contrasting colours, and the addition of stars in this one, make the two paintings unique enough from each other that I think they were both worth doing.