"A Question of Scale"

About this time last year, I was just getting established in my new basement studio after all the months and angst of moving from our old house. Placing some of my cherished artifacts on studio shelves, I became fascinated again with their shadows cast against the studio wall/ceiling -- a similar fascination to the one that led to my 2008 painting "The Artist's Hand, the Artist's Eye." 

As I continued unpacking -- congratulating myself on saving treasures ranging from my mother's antiques to my own hoards of clam shells -- I couldn't help but note how much I enjoy unique labels on bottles and boxes, preferably anthropo- or zoo-morphic. (Maybe I should have gone into package design?) Then I suddenly remembered a coffee break conversation from an early drawing class.

The topic had shifted to our instructor's painting experience and he casually said, "Do you know what has always intrigued me about paintings?" "Colour!!" we answered in chorus. "Well, sure," he said, "but I'm talking about scale." Scale? We looked blank. "You know -- you'll have a canvas, maybe 2x3 feet, and on it are all these little people in a crowd scene -- or maybe a bowl of fruit with lemons larger than could ever be possible." Scale.

Suddenly, it became irresistible to play with this idea within a painting. I rearranged some objects to illustrate the point:

Then I decided, in keeping with the theme, that I'd need to do a carefully planned layout, to scale -- a decision that would cost me about 45 hours of work before I even set paint to paper, as described in a previous post. 

I started with a 10" x 13" drawing, which took me a mere 20 hours:

-- and eventually scaled this up to 20" x 26", the size of my painting paper -- to which I then transferred the outlines.

To accomplish the transfer of the same-size layout to my painting paper, I cut away sections of the large drawing, bit by bit -- more painstaking work, which much later yielded some amusing moments when I could place the pencilled figures against their painted counterparts.

And now...ta tum...five months in the making, here's the final painting: "A Question of Scale" (copyright 2013).

So what do we have here, contained within a space of about 520 square inches? Three human figures of different sizes, each larger than a mountain (see the blue mug) and smaller than a brandy bottle (Metaxa -- a delicious treat in days gone by; white wine does nicely nowadays); a wren-type bird larger than a seagull and a leopard's head (see the Metaxa box); two mugs of different sizes and two similar bottles of different sizes which, if stacked, would be twice the size of the mannikin human figure.

The evolution of this painting can be seen here  -- and it's not a process that I'm ever likely to get involved in again.

Holding this up against my general goal to make each painting "my best yet".... well, it's not. In fact, there are so many mistakes (about which the artist's lips are sealed), it could be a nice example of "What's wrong with this picture?" Still: I learned a lot and worked the idea out of my system -- but one has to wonder if the outcome was proportionate to the effort.