In the land of red fezzes

Here's a painting (done in oil on panel) in the same style as a bunch of others scattered across my blog.

All of those panels are covered in linen or paper, but in this one I painted directly on the sanded (eggshell smooth) gesso covered panel. It's got much less tooth and texture than many of my other paintings, so the surface was really slippery, and if I wasn't being careful a brushstroke would remove as much paint as it was applying.


(click to enlarge)


I've been thinking a bit about scale in these pieces. Some of my paintings are pretty sizable, eight feet across or so, and others are tiny, just a couple of inches across. This one is quite modestly scaled at 18" by 24".

When you see art in person, scale is one of the first things that you notice. I remember in art school, scale was a primary virtue (we regularly described works as "heroic" by which we meant "big"). You could impress your peers and get dates just by making art that was sufficiently large.

It's interesting how the internet has collapsed that. Viewed in a browser, giant pieces don't have any more punch than small pieces, and often less, as the small piece is designed to be seen at the scale of a monitor. And the small painting can be directly scanned, resulting in a tremendously cleaner reproduction than is possible with a large one (short of spending a couple hundred thousand on one of these or a couple tens of thousands on one of these).

And while people certainly see a painting in person, in a gallery or a museum, vastly more will see it online.
I'm guessing that you wouldn't be any more impressed with the painting above if I told you it was 6 feet across. So at least here, for this audience viewing in this medium, making it heroic is kind of pointless.

Updated: another pass on color and contrast.