“Black Butte Series – Autumn Aspens” 36″ x 48″ oil and wax on canvas – $3,500
I love painting large paintings, but every once in a while my creativity bumps into practicality and I have to paint smaller canvases. That is what is happening this month as I’m getting ready for the Portland Art Museum Rental/Sales spring show.
Knowing that the show was coming up soon I had nearly completed a 36″ x 60″ painting and was planning the second one when the notice of the show arrived and I learned that due to space limitations they wanted medium to small paintings. Artists’ perceptions of “small” vary a lot, but there is no way that painting could be considered even medium sized.
I’m not sure why my affection for large paintings developed, but part of it may have been my art classes at the University of Washington. At that time most of the students were encouraged to paint on large canvases and we often amused people as we were struggling with the Seattle wind to get our newly stretched canvases across campus to the art building.
I’m constantly amazed when looking at art magazines and seeing a wonderful landscape to find its size to be tiny. I have a lot of respect for the artists who give grandeur to such a small canvas, and particularly, for those artists who paint both small and large paintings equally well.
My personal vision of landscapes just seems to be on a large scale and I get out of my comfort zone when I have to paint a small canvas. I was discussing this with an artist friend who also paints large and she says she just finds the larger format to be more satisfying. That is part of it, but I also want the painting to have “impact” and so far, with the smaller works, that is the challenge.
The painting above is a newly completed “medium” sized painting in my Black Butte Aspen series.
