Sitting outside on campus getting ready to draw some copies, getting a little preview of what it will be like later, I guess. The sunlight reflecting off the paper is almost blinding. It's an interesting contrast to the pitch black of the Clara Peeters still life background, like, a place where the elements aren't able to go. Yet, the sun still hits the page of the book, and if it rained, the book would still get wet. Though the data of the painting would not be compromised since the original is elsewhere.

The black of the background gives the still life objects a luminescent quality. It makes me think of TV and computer screens in dark rooms, rather than well lit, peopled homes - the image of the agoraphobic. There are no plants or fruits. The objects are either processed or from underwater. Could there be tension and a sort of resentment toward the home and domesticity here as well? It's dark, there's no life, there's a knife and claws and things on the verge of falling. Maybe it is even an unconscious sentiment. I don't think it's a hateful painting. It still feels like a picture of comfort and pleasure. It's just . . . complicated; strained. Fictitious. Auto-fictitious - a lie we tell ourselves. "We" being Clara Peeters and I.