It's a Small world

Or, it appears at this particular moment, it’s a small art world. Following on from the quote in my previous piece about what will sell, I have been pondering the matter of size for a while. Small is beautiful, so the old saying goes, and for some time now, fellow artists, prospective buyers and gallery owners have been telling me I need to make smaller work. Only last week, a London gallerist who is interested in exhibiting my paintings told me that “size matters” when it comes to what flies off the walls, and that an associate of his will only exhibit work that can fit in the back of a car. (You can imagine how this jangled with my sensibilities as an artist, but one has to acknowledge market criteria if one is trying to sell one’s work.) Whilst I understand that the number of people who have the budget and the space for large pieces is limited, I was quite surprised by this (thinking there must be loads of big white walls in the penthouse flats and dockland apartments of London), and not a little disconcerted, because I now find it very difficult to work on a small scale.

Over the last five years, as my confidence as a painter has grown, so has the size of my canvases. As my work has got larger, I have enjoyed the freedom of movement that a big canvas gives me. During the making process, I feel my paintings in a rhythmical sense and want to make the paint dance freely and expansively across the canvas. In fact I would dearly love to dance across the canvas myself like one of Yves Klein’s naked Anthropometry models covered in paint. This will come as no surprise to my children who were quite used to seeing their slightly crazy mother dancing round the house naked to loud music (most definitely one of the best ways to lift one’s spirits) when they were growing up. My own mother always says it was impossible to keep clothes on me as a toddler, and even now as a woman of “a certain age”, I still find it liberating and exhilarating to shed my clothes and dance around the room like a 19 year old. (The heating has to be on or the sun out of course – never have been able to stand the cold.) This love of dance and movement was why I embraced so joyfully the idea of “border crossings” in the Crimson Project, bringing together other artforms and combining them. I liked giving painting a broader context, liked involving the audience more with use of poetry in them, presenting something they could relate to. I felt I could achieve this more with big paintings. They seem to breathe more, are more alive, taking up space and reaching out to the audience, inviting them in and giving their eyes a generous landscape to roam in.

If I had the good fortune to find a regular flow of clients with big walls to fill, I would let my canvases get bigger and bigger, but in the current climate buyers are thin on the ground and I shall, for now, have to take the advice of those that know what sells and try to think small.

The challenge is then to still make a big statement with my small paintings, like a loud noise from a small instrument, a bright light from a small lamp, a bold concept from a small acorn of an idea. That’s the plan anyway .... I’ll let you know how I get on . . . .

Watch this small space.