It's the Lighting: TRP no. 8

 Is it eight? Depends how you count. This will be the eighth painting for me and the toys to recreate:

Heh. I had chosen to recreate Beatrix Potter's Tailor of Gloucester last week––without consulting the toys here!––because I thought something easy and cute like that might encourage more people to play along––but, in fact, only two other people recreated it along with me. Mighty fine they were, too.
And it was fun to do the turnip version at work.

LESSON: As they sing, "You can't please everybody, so you've got to please your dolls."

I asked the girlettes, as I should have all along, and they said, "We never wanted to do that mouse!"
They've been waiting, waiting, waiting, they say, to do Judith and Her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes---and they all want to play the head of Holofernes!

I'd hesitated because I'd thought it would be too complicated, too hard to set up that scene; but in fact, when I look at it, most of the effect comes from the lighting. (I mean, besides the subject matter.) Photographing dramatic lighting isn't very hard--not like painting it would be. I don't have Photoshop, but the simplest of editing tools will increase contrast, and if I can't get it right, in camera, I can resort to that.
(Famous last words, right?)

I looked up the story of Judith again--from the Book of Judith*. [Nice retelling here, at the Jewish Women's Archive.]
I'd never realized that Holofernes was strangling her town by cutting off their water!
I wonder if any of the pipeline protestors and other contemporary water defenders have used her story. (Not that I've noticed.)

Anyway, I am feeling impatient with The Humans lately, as I've mentioned, and this is a great story about the good, the bad, and the ugly of us. Including painter Artemisia Gentileschi's own personal story.

Join in if you like. Don't burn down the house! (Unless you wanted to all along.)
________
* What? The Book of Judith is excluded from the Hebrew canon? Also the Protestant Bible?
I didn't know that!

According to Wikipedia:

"The Book of Judith is a deuterocanonical book, included in the Septuagint and the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christian Old Testament of the Bible, but excluded from the Hebrew canon and assigned by Protestants to the apocrypha.

"Reasons for its exclusion include the lateness of its composition, possible Greek origin, open support of the Hasmonean dynasty (to which the early rabbinate was opposed), and perhaps the brash and seductive character of Judith herself."