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Posted
Having just had a great trip to see the Georgia O Keeffe exhibition in a very hot and sticky London....sorry folk if you are fed up with me harping on, The first room of that exhibition was full of small stuff. I just sailed straight past it and straight to the big, colourful exciting stuff that makes my heart sing.
I tend to do that in most exhibitions, yes, there are gems that are small , glowing and just wonderful. But its the big paintings I love.
I also do life drawing and no way can I sit and draw the figure with small fiddly strokes it just dosent work for me.
Posted
Small verses large - I guess this is something on which we all have different opinions. However, I ask myself, how big is a small painting before it becomes a large painting and how small is a large painting before it becomes a small painting? I guess this is something else we'll all have different opinions on.
Posted
Well, quite Michael!
For me, 18" by 24", to take a fairly random size, is large - I rarely paint much bigger: although I do have some 60cm by 80cm canvases (sorry for the confusion between Imperial and metric, but I can't easily convert: we didn't do metric when I was at school: but I know the latter is BIG). For others, they measure their paintings in feet - or whatever the metric equivalent of a foot is: I don't know!
I suspect larger paintings are probably selling better at the moment, but these are fashions - and I don't like being governed by fashion. I choose the size by preference, by suitability to the subject in hand, and also by the space I have available to paint it in. The idea that there's any kind of superiority in big over small is something I just find baffling: why would there be? I like relatively small paintings, I paint relatively small paintings - I think a big painting surface probably gives greater freedom of movement, and I'm afraid (I'm not really, I'm just being polite...) that it's much easier to paint a big picture than a small one: if only because you can more easily see what you're doing and that it's easier to scale up than it is to scale down, though this applies more to portraiture than to landscape. I am not fantastically impressed by huge portrait paintings - technically, they are easier to do than life-size or just above life-size, and anyone who doesn't know that has never tried to do it. ( Red rag produced - bulls unleashed.)
http://www.isleofwightandscapes.net
http://www.wightpaint.blogspot.co.uk
Posted
I honestly think this is going around in circles...Bulls chasing own tail. Personally I prefer BIG...Syd likes small. Its not really that relevant (sorry Michael you started all this) We each do what suits us. Otherwise we might as well all give up right now, all would be regimentated ,colours , subjects ,size... Nah, lets just get on with being individuals.
Posted
As precious little is selling at the moment whatever size it is, this doesn't actually matter much....
The interesting thing to me was the question about 'easiness' of one as opposed to the other, big as opposed to small; but, if Sylvia feels we have drifted into pointless repetition, so be it; I'm sure I'm not one to take offence. No indeed. I can withstand the slings and arrows - AND I've learned something about metric conversion, so boo, Evans!
Ahem. As I say, I'm not one to betray undue sensitivity just because I've been caught out in repetition, discursiveness, idle chatter, persiflage, badinage, or, indeed, rannygazoo. Heaven forfend....
Sulk......
http://www.isleofwightlandscapes.net
http://www.wightpaint.blogspot.co.uk
Posted
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? (Although 15' x 40' is big by anyone's standard). I certainly didn’t mean to state that big is better because it’s big (I haven’t looked back but I believe all of my comments on such were preceded by I think . . . or I prefer . . . or similar).
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? Or the bare field in winter? 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), but who I suspect (I’m typing with one hand as I wave the red rag with the other) that both you Syd, and you Robert would not be excited by—Lewis 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 do think of Lewis Noble's work (http://lewisnoble.co.uk/content/)
J
Posted
The link doesn't unfortunately take me anywhere very interesting - ie, there's no work on it, just a box inviting me to enter a search: but as I don't know what I'm supposed to be searching for, that could be awkward..... check it yourself, and you'll see what I mean.
I don't object to or dislike large pictures by the way, the 'ease' element is that you have the freedom to exaggerate and move about the canvas in a large picture which you don't in a small one, so I do think that a 10" by 8", say, is more difficult to do than - say - a 30" by 40". Once the painting becomes huge - a matter of 5 or 6 feet across, different issues arise. My uncle, as an example, could paint tolerable murals - well, they were as good as wallpaper, if that's a mark of quality or achievement - but his smaller pictures were usually distinctly less successful: he had an interesting habit of managing to make it look as if the world just came to an end on his horizon, so a step beyond it and you'd be falling through limitless space..... he didn't know how to convey a world within a confined space, he needed all those extra feet......
I shall Google Mr Noble, and if I can find him, will return.....
http://www.isleofwightlandscapes.net
http://www.wightpaint.blogspot.co.uk
Posted
OK, found him now via a Google search.
I do like most of his work, though am less keen on the way he 'distresses' it, or seems to, by scoring randomly into the paint; I think it's become a bit of a habit with him, by the look of it, rather like those who invariably show drip marks coming down their paintings - once or twice that might be effective, but endlessly repeated it just starts to get irritating.
http://www.isleofwightlandscapes.net
http://www.wightpaint.blogspot.co.uk
Posted
I recently went on a cruise which hosted an art gallery run by a very successful chain of high street galleries. I also saw one of their high street galleries in Cambridge. ( look up Whitewall Gallery). Interestingly they don't seem to stock many small paintings. I guess, because they can charge more for larger ones. From the stock on the walls, I suspect that hey sell more medium sized ones, particularly as most people are more likely to find space on their walls for medium, rather than large. I was horrified by their best selling artists e.g Doug Hyde (paintings designed to have meaning to autistic people (hearts and hugs). I thought that they were more suited to greetings cards than the fine art market. But apparently they are best sellers apparently in Japan!. There was another artist who specialised in charcoal drawings of famous churches - I did things like this when I was 15! Another best selling artist did loose charcoal drawings of VW campers. there were also some acrylics covered in thick, very shiny polyurethane varnish - so shiny that you could not see the brushwork or anything else. There were also some naive fishing village paintings.
So if you want to know what actually sells, I think the answer is gimmicks!
Posted
Can completely understand working small - it's not really for me though as I struggle to capture the detail I crave on small canvases. I prefer to work on 40x32" or somewhere close to that. I have started working smaller purely because it sometimes takes me 3 months to complete a large painting, and I've always been one for instant gratification, but I sometimes feel there's something missing from my smaller work.
Posted
Now to throw a spanner in the works. My watercolours are nearly all painted to the same size - 18ins by 14 ins mounted. I have never regarded them as being large nor small - sort of mediumish. May I propose a further category of 'medium' to add to the debate.
BUT don't ask me about measurements as to where one starts and the other finishes.