Smallpaintings popular?

My preferred size is 20 x 30... however I am concerning moving down a few inches.... as 20 x 30 is quite large. But I do get excited at looking at a big blank canvas knowing that I am going to create something on it.

Every year for the past 5 years or so I've contributed 3 - went mad this year, and gave them 4 - postcard sized paintings for Art for Youth: these are all priced at £35, the buyer doesn't know who the artist is until they've parted with their money and turned the picture over: it gives me huge pleasure, imagining the crushing disappointment....... The money raised goes to various youth projects; I understand it raised £7,000 last year: a modest haul, but useful. I find this immeasurably difficult - I can't use oil for practical reasons which will be obvious, I've tried watercolour, acrylic, a mixture of same, even a bit of gouache this year, but even before I had the cataract I found this sort of size incredibly restricting: you're more or less forced to use small brushes, which I don't normally do: I think I'll use a palette knife and heavy acrylic next year, and forget about scenes, and detail - could be my first ever abstract coming up...... Wish I'd thought of that this year, because I really wouldn't want to be judged on the basis of what I can paint on a postcard. http://www.isleofwightlandscapes.net http://www.wightpaint.blogspot.co.uk

Just be reassured and carry on regardless! When my sister was at art college, she was told to take her glasses off, so she would stop seeing the detail!

Robert—moooo. . . (or whatever noise a bull makes; it’s a sort of moo). I didn’t do them metrics at school either, but working in graphics since the late ‘60s and using a one-foot plastic rule every day I couldn’t help notice that the twelve-inch rule (which has cm on the other edge) is 30.5 cm, therefore 60 cm is a little less than 24 inches, I later learnt that the conversion is easy, it’s approximately 2.5 cm per inch (2.54 for when you need an exact conversion). So 60 x 80 is 23.6 x 31.4 inches—more or less an imperial sheet. Well, I’d agree that that’s not small, but I’d only call it big with qualification. And really Robert, big paintings are easier, come, come now. Would you say that to David Hockney about his Bigger Trees Near Warter painting (15 ft x 40 ft)? But after all, as Michael has said, just what is big and what is small? I certainly didn’t mean to—and I'm pretty sure that I didn't—state that big is better because it’s big. I’m beginning to wonder if what’s at the root of our divergence of opinions is what we are each, respectively, attempting to do with the work. I produce a lot of landscape drawings and paintings and they are all of a relatively small area of East Yorkshire. It’s an area that I love, and I love being in and amongst it. It’s also agricultural, and very flat—not the archetypal stone bridge over the wandering river English landscape type of thing. Both the agricultural nature and the flatness present challenges—how do you deal with a scene in which the only vertical accents are the electricity poles and maybe the occasional tree in the hedgerow and where the bright yellow rape seed flowers or the golden wheat stretches to the horizon? But it’s the challenges that make it exciting. I don’t work en plein air with paint but all of my ‘finished’ work is based upon drawings and pastel sketches done on location (I don't use photographs). That said the ‘finished’ work is in no way intended to be an accurate depiction, in a photographic sense, of that location and may well be a synthesis of many sketches done on many different occasions. Lewis Noble—a contemporary landscape artist whose work excites and inspires me (and who I know works in a similar manner), expressed it well in saying that the work is about being in the landscape, not about of the landscape (as in a picture of . . .) I relate to that very closely. In the spirit of a spirited discussion, I'd be interested to know what you have to say about Lewis Noble's work. http://lewisnoble.co.uk/content/ Oh, and as an afterthought, Syd, re the quarto-imperial, if it’s cut from a full imperial sheet, surely it must have a cut edge on two sides mustn’t it? When I said I like the deckle I meant the full deckle. If I use a folio (often) or quarto (occasionally) I avoid the cut edge by ‘tearing’ (it’s a little more than just tearing but tearing will do for now).

Robert—yes, it was the /content that did it I think. There appears to be some glitch in this site around pasting in web adds. Just http://lewisnoble.co.uk should do the job, but you’ve sorted it yourself. When you say “I think it's become a bit of a habit with him . . .” I do see where you’re coming from, but I can’t help thinking that this overlooks the central point, if I may be so bold. The distressing of LN’s work is not an affectation (not your word, true, but it is what your comment implies (yes/no?)), but is very much a part of what the work is about. As quoted earlier, it is about being IN the landscape, not about a picture of the landscape. Some of the scoring and marking is structural and some is, as you say, random. The purpose behind both in a sense, but the random marks in particular—be they scored or other—is about taking risks; it’s about trying to go beyond the picture of and see what happens. It’s also about not being too precious about the work. If it fails, well . . . it’s only a painting, the sun will still come up tomorrow. Similarly, I would argue, the ‘drips’ you also refer to are about the act of painting. ([url=http://www.petemonaghan.com). They]http://www.petemonaghan.com). They[/url] are a statement if you will, that says this is a painting; I make no apology for that; it doesn’t pretend to be anything else. And it is also, in a more restrained way, about taking risks. And personally I love to see how an artist has pushed the paint around and to see that evidence of how the work developed. I find this very exciting and I feel that I learn an awful lot from it. I would also argue that the difference between the in the landscape and the picture of the landscape approach is that in the former the work needs to looked at in the same way; as an experience of being in. It’s a very active process that involves considering the subject matter and looking at the work purely as an abstraction, whereas in the latter the ‘looking’ is more passive and is centred much more on the subject. Drawing and painting for me are very active processes—as I think I said earlier somewhere, I always stand when I’m working; I just can’t do it sitting down. Similarly, looking at someone else’s work is an active process—or at least that’s what I want from it. I want to be challenged; I want to have my expectations upturned and disturbed—destroyed even. That’s how I move forward; that’s what inspires me. If you find LN’s ‘distressing’ distressing (sorry, couldn’t resist that), I wonder what you’ll think of (http://www.messums.com/artists/view/940/David_Tress) although I'm now not confident that although that link works fine for me, it will not glitch out on this site. If it does it's the David Tress page of Messum's gallery. Syd—re the inches v cm thing again. My remarks were intended to be anecdotal, not pedagogic. The peculiar thing is that—referring to my foot rule anecdote again—I quickly found that when creating that camera-ready artwork it was so much easier to use the cm side of the rule and I soon was able to visualise and conceptualise cm measurements up to 12 inches. Beyond that however I had—and still have—little idea, so if asked I would say that I use metric up to 12 inches and feet & inches above that. Makes complete sense to me. Also maybe I didn’t make myself completely clear re the deckle, probably because it is so routine for me that I forgot that it’s not the same for everyone. I wasn’t referring to the deckle as a sign of quality. When I use a folio or quarto size I don’t cut the sheet because the deckle is a part of the work and is visible when framed or mounted, so although there is a difference between the true deckle-edge and my ‘simulated’ deckle, it’s not as severe as a cut edge. My thinking behind this—such as it is—is similar to David Hockney’s reasoning around his very excellent joiner-pictures. You may be familiar with it, but In summary, the world doesn’t have a rectangle around it; that’s not how we see and experience the world. In his joiner photographs he was seeking to explore ways around this limitation. David Tress’s work comes from a similar view. He stopped (he says) spending months and months using a brush with three bristles to paint individual grass stems because that was not how he experienced—and enjoyed—the landscape. And he also speaks often about the excitement of taking risks with his painting and compares it to the excitement he feels about being in the landscape. My visible deckle is also a part of that desire to not pretend that ‘this’ is anything else but paint on paper.

PS. I see the Pete Monaghan link has got corrupted in the pasting again. http://www.petemonaghan.com/petemon/home.html

Yes you definitely get a medal Syd - a small one with a deckled edge - not for starting the topic Syd but for such admirable patience in counting the number of posts.

JohnD - yes, I can understand most of that (which must cheer you enormously....!): it's whether I agree with it or not that's the question in my mind, and that'll probably be in the region of half-way there and not necessarily much further.... The trouble - for me - with the paintings that feature drips is that I don't think they are part of the painting process, they're added afterwards for an effect which I think has become rapidly hackneyed. I haven't yet looked at your latest links, by the way, but I will. The scoring into the paint is a different matter - I can see that's part of the process of creating the painting, even the more random elements: but I fear it might become a cliché in time, if it isn't yet. I have similar problems (if that's the word) with Kurt Jackson's paintings on which he adds written notes, as he would in a sketch-book: I very much enjoy his paintings, but the writing doesn't do anything to add to them, for me. But of course - it's me, me, me: I don't necessarily respond to these approaches, but that doesn't do anything at all to invalidate them in itself. I think also that the "in/of the landscape" is problematic - in that I suspect one can become too hung up about this sort of thing and end up with a slightly neurotic statement: which again, doesn't invalidate the practice - neurosis is the father and mother of much modern art, and a fair amount of classical painting as well (although perhaps we can understand the latter rather less). I don't know that I have a particularly simple mind at all, but it may be too logical for its own good, and resistant to extrapolation of concepts and introspection - a phrase which will have to stand on its own, because while I know what I mean by it, I'm not sure I can explain it without droning on too much. The "as we see the landscape" concept - I don't think there's any way in which even the cleverest of us can replicate the landscape, or represent it, as we really experience it: I certainly can't - of course, painting on a rectangle and bunging a frame around it is,when you stop to think about it, a highly unnatural thing to do; it may be a practical thing to do, in that the frame has the function of concentrating one's vision - even (why do I say "even"? Wish I knew...) Howard Hodgkin puts a frame around his work, in the sense of painting a frame; and may then put his paint-framed picture into a physical frame; and may then paint over that. His paintings thus draw the eye in - "to what?", is the question I find myself asking, and "not much" is all too often the answer. Still, it's got him a knighthood - and a living. My problem with a lot of this is that it seems to me sometimes - often - to be a rather desperate way of making the act of painting relevant by complicating it in the name of challenging boundaries and concepts, but without actually producing very much that one would want to look at. http://www.isleofwightlandscapes.net http://www.wightpaint.blogspot.co.uk

Certainly enjoyed viewing Monaghan's work