I’ve been thinking a lot about scale lately, particularly in regards to painting. My current painting process of working with watercolor markers on paper seems to lend itself to a small scale, despite my attempts to work bigger.
And why have I wanted to work bigger?
First, there is a lingering feeling (probably brought on by years of looking at paintings) that in painting, bigger immediately equals more serious and more important. And so, if I want to be taken seriously as a painter, I need to work bigger.
There is also my desire to want to bring an emotional response to my work. And when I think about the works of art I’ve seen in person that have given me a strong emotional response (like this Diebenkorn painting or this painting by Jay DeFeo) they all tend to be larger. And while I keep reminding myself of really great small work (like Indian miniature painting), my mind always quickly goes back to the really large paintings I’ve seen in my life that have blown me away.
And while it is these larger paintings that are sticking in my mind, I’m also equally influenced by this image on Pinterest. I’m not sure whether it’s a work on paper or a print, but I love the scale of this one dramatic work in this room.
And Pinterest in particular and the Internet in general brings me around to a final reason I’m thinking about scale right now. We’re in a moment where so much of the art we view is completely divorced from any sense of scale. Everything we see scrolls past us in similarly sized rectangles on a screen.
On that screen, we lose the sense of what it means to stand in front of an immense work of art or even to get lost in the detail of a miniature painting that calls us in from a distance. On a screen, we lose sense of a work of art’s relationship to our own body, and that is a huge loss.
So what I am doing with all these thoughts on scale?
As I mentioned, my own attempts to work larger with my current process of watercolor markers on paper haven’t yielded the results I’ve been after yet. I do have some plans to experiment more with larger works on canvas, but I will admit that I’m currently much more interested in the qualities I’m seeing in watercolor on paper than I am on working on canvas.
Plus, this aforementioned Pinterest image has me fixated on larger works on paper.
So my next thought is to harness the power of digital technologies to print some of my small watercolor images at a much larger scale.
This print is only the first experiment (I’m still waiting for me to come in) but I think it’s an interesting way to play with scale, while also amplifying the natural details of the watercolor.
And while in my last foray into painting, I wasn’t really interested in making (or selling) prints, because I wasn’t crazy about taking my large abstract paintings on canvas and making them smaller, I am interested in the possibility of prints to push the scale of my watercolor paintings.
Right now, these are mostly just experiments for me. But I may decide to make them into prints for sale down the road. And if I do, my mailing list will be the first to hear about it! (So make sure you join!)
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