Does size matter?

There’s always been something magical about those gigantic canvases on the top shelf in the store.  At the museum, life size portraits, landscapes that stretch across your field of vision, drawing you in.

When I started painting, I went for, at minimum, 16 by 20 inch canvas.  I wanted that grandness.  But I wasn’t ready for it.  My “aha” moment came when I read Carol Marine’s “Daily Painting”, at the very beginning when she talks about not feeling like a real unless you work on huge canvases.  The problem was, I rarely finished any of these, and the ones I did, I didn’t like.

After reading Marine’s book, and seeing many other artists’ small works on social media, I gave it a try.  I bought a stack of 5×7 canvas boards, and dug in.  Suddenly, I was producing work I really liked, and finding myself enjoying painting even more. Even better, working small actually gave me MORE space to experiment and learn about things like paint handling, color mixing, and overall process.  Spending less time on a single piece let me feel free to paint the same subject more than once, and helped me get over my fear that every piece had to be “perfect”.

So while I’m still tempted by the canvases that are bigger than me, my rack of blank canvases in the studio is dominated by lots of little blank pages waiting to be filled.