April 21, 2013

Does Size Matter?


Jacopo Tintoretto, Paradise, 1592; oil on canvas, 30 x 74 feet. (see an excellent enlargement here)


Is bigger better? (speaking of artworks of course). It's been many years since I stood in front of this gigantic painting by Tintoretto, so I don't know how I'd feel about it now. Does the wow factor translate into something deeper?


Fra Angelico, The Apostle Saint James Freeing the Magician Hermogenes, 1425-29; tempera and gold on panel, 10.2 x 9 in. 


Or is there a different kind of awe that comes from the intense focus and intimacy that a very small work calls forth? The small predella panels of Fra Angelico have given me deep and complex aesthetic and emotional pleasure.


The Master of Catherine of Cleves, The Hours of Catherine of Cleves, ca. 1440, Saint Valentine; 7 1/2 x 5 1/8 in. Detail.


Seeing this exhibition of the Hours of Catherine of Cleves at the Morgan Library (you can see the entire manuscript in hi-res images at the link) inspired me to begin painting on parchment. The paintings are close to small miracles, taking us into a closely observed world full of stories and wonder.


Richard Serra, Junction/Cycle, 2011


In contemporary art, an artist who immediately springs to mind when thinking about very large work is Richard Serra. I happen to have come to love and appreciate his work, writing about my change of heart here. In thinking about the size of Serra's work, I feel that the enormity of it is essential to its meaning: our physical relationship with it, walking through and around it, is a powerful experience.


Ken Price, Geometrics, installation view from his retrospective at the LA County Museum of Art


At the same time there is someone like Ken Price, making tabletop clay sculpture, completely engaging and endlessly inventive.


Joel Shapiro, installation view from 2009 exhibition at LA Louver.


Or Joel Shapiro, who has made sculpture from tiny floor pieces to large public projects. I like his pieces like these, which are a smaller than human sized, where form and content and scale seem to work so well together. So here is a question: is Serra so much more well regarded than these other sculptors because he's truly a better artist, or because his works are monumental in size?


Anselm Kiefer, Jerusalem, 1986; acrylic, emulsion, shellac, and gold leaf on canvas (in two parts), with steel and lead; 12 1/2 x 18 1/3 feet.


When I think of giantism in contemporary painting, I think of Anselm Kiefer. I have had the opposite experience with Kiefer's work as with Serra's, beginning by admiring it enormously when I first saw it in the 1980s, finding a rich narrative in the imagery and use of materials, but now feeling bullied by the paintings; they seem to be unnecessarily large, like male braggadoccio. I've felt the same way about Frank Stella's work, and wrote a blog post about his "Irregular Polygon" series, which I felt were much much too large for their content and form. 


Raoul de Keyser, Again, 2010; watercolor and charcoal on canvas mounted on wooden panel, 
6 1/3 x 11 4/5 in. 


For me, the way I'm feeling about art making now, I find looking at modestly sized works such as those of Raoul de Keyser (see more paintings here) much more satisfying. Intimacy and tenderness are important qualities, certainly as important as boldness and grandeur. So now I come to why I've written this post, a brief complaint: I am tired of people telling me to work larger, telling me that my paintings, textiles, drawings, would look great really really big. They are not meant to be big; part of their meaning resides in their small size; at a larger size they'd be different work, work I'm not interested in doing now, though I have in the past and might in the future. Why is it that no one tells an artist about her six foot painting "gee, that would look so great at 12 inches!"? Each of us has to find what we want to say in our work, and how to say it, at whatever size works best; there should be no outsized respect for large work in itself.


16 comments:

  1. It would be interesting to know if the person questioning the size of your work is a painter or someone working in textiles.
    I'm always tussling with matters of scale - textiles and the techniques for using them have their limitations, the least of which would be the time it takes to finish a piece.

    To my eye, those "small strokes" - the stitches, folds, knots, etc. are lost when the viewer is pushed across the room by large pieces with compelling imagery. I tell myself "I might as well paint" but here I am working on a textile piece measured in feet rather than inches. More of "why" in in the actual making I think.

    I appreciate the scale of your hooked pieces. The marshaling and march of the stitches is as intrinsic to the whole as the shapes and gradations of colors.

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    1. Thanks, Deb, for the comment. I've had comments from both painters and people in textiles. The textile people tend to say that they see my textiles are large rugs and I have to explain that they are meant as wall art.

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  2. Having worked very large at one time and now working very small, (I have also received suggestions to work larger), I find one thing about the small work that for me is very important, I can finish a piece in one thought. When working on a larger piece many ideas and much life intervenes and it is often hard to come back to the original inspiration for the work. This doesn't happen with smaller work. The other good thing about working small is that you can sit down the whole time. These are not small considerations as one ages.

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    1. Nancy, you bring up an important point, which Deb touches on abaove, which is that when working small you can move through a lot of ideas more quickly. This is a consideration with me in making textiles: I have so many ideas that I wouldn't want to spend several months working on just one of them.

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  3. This is an ongoing issue for most artists, don't you think? One of the first things I remember in studying art was hearing teachers talk about how every image has its optimal size, how a sketch doesn't necessarily translate into a large work.

    But size became a union card of sorts, and certainly that was what Brice Marden was referring to when he talked about seeing all those giant oversized paintings in the galleries in Chelsea and in his experience they were "dead." When he was working on the Muses and/or the Cold Mountain series he said he set out to paint a large painting that wasn't dead. (Which IMHO I think he achieved.)

    As for the new Sultan body of work, I second your instincts. The intimacy of size of the pieces I saw last summer is part of their power. The one that hangs in my home is perfect, absolutely perfect, and it is small in size. Don't listen to anyone who tells you to upscale them.

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    1. Thanks Deborah, for your supportive comment. When I was studying art, I remember being told to work larger; you must have had more sensitive teachers. I think it's a challenge to make a painting of any size that isn't dead.

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  4. I think size or scale is in relative terms to the size of us humans. If we were bigger or smaller things we create might look all together different. I think of what our fashion would look like if we had 2 heads and 3 arms, the designers would have to go back to the drawing board. as far as scale in painting or wall art it either draws you in or makes you stand back and the reason should be apparant
    . when you approach a very large peice, larger than life size, you see detail that might have been meant to be part of a larger gestalt and at a distance makes more sense and vice versa. either way, size should not be used in and of itself for pretense. good painting when alive will reveal itself.

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    1. So true, Maralyn, "good painting when alive will reveal itself".

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  5. I saw a very interesting and amusing show in NYC a few years ago called "Size Matters", curated by, of all people, Shaquille O'Neal. Every piece in the show was either oversized or miniature. One piece was a normal dining-room set, a table and four chairs, only the height of the table was ceiling height, and the chair seats were as tall as a man. Walking around under it, one felt like a house cat. Other pieces were so small that they had to be viewed through a microscope. I have often thought that monumental sized paintings were made with large museum walls in mind.

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    1. That sounds like it was a brilliant show, Amy, and a treat to see.

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  6. As an artist develops through different stages, size is considered as his ideas change. Talking from experience, I have found that after a period of painting large scale, I feel the challenge of going small. Then after a while, say 4-5 years, I change back to large. Changing back and forth seems only natural to me. Changing ideas, attitudes, opinions, work ethics, men, women, food, sleep habits, life itself, change is natural with us humans.

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    1. That is so true, jackson, change is natural. Not all artists change much over their painting lives, though; look at Morandi for instance. But I'm like you, having gone from small to large to very large to small and now to very small.

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  7. Well said, Altoon. Large size seemed to be a hallmark of late modern art. Seeing the machismo or possible aggressiveness in some of those works rings true. As a new artist I once took a painting class at night at the Atlanta College of Art. The teacher had us fold a letter sized sheet of paper in multiple folds, then open it up and paint a different abstract little painting in each small folded square area. They were maybe 2" x 2". They were supposed to be studies for larger works. I loved all of mine on that paper. Later I created a large abstract based on one of my favorite abstract squares, but I could never make it look right. Scale had thrown the proportions out of whack, even though I tried to copy the paint placement exactly.I learned a "big" lesson about big and small. Currently I'm in an art crit group in Atlanta with a woman who works with small discarded found objects. They are quiet, sensual, and just right...intimate prints, paintings, clay and mixed media pieces about aging and life all around us. http://www.susiewinton.com/

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    1. Thanks Cecilia. Being that I began this post with a late Renaissance work, I don't think large is new to modernism. All those churches had to be decorated after all. That sounds like a great project you had to do with the small work. It's often hard to scale something up; sometimes it's easier to do it in small doses. Susie Winton's work is lovely.

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  8. Altoon,
    I will be spending the three months of summer in Peacham VT, renting a small apartment in a farmhouse, getting away from the Atlanta heat and doing artwork in a second bedroom. I believe I'll be near St. Johnsbury where I think you live? I'd love to stop by at some point to say hello. Would that be alright?

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    1. Certainly, Cecelia; Peacham is just 8 miles up the road. Email me using the "contact me" link on the upper right part of the blog page.

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