Going Big.

The blank page is a brutal thing. It has implicit in it, infinite possibilities, limited only by the dimensions of the surface and the material one is using. If you scale the dimensions up, the possible outcomes seemingly grow as well. It’s almost like adding more keys to a piano. 

As a younger artist, I often worried about “ruining” a page, canvas, sketchbook or wall. I don’t have that fear anymore. It’s been beaten out of me through years of making and breaking stuff. I’ve recognized that there now is a desire to work big. More materials, bigger ideas. 

I’ve worked at such dinky sizes for so long I forgot what painting with a house brush feels like and it’s pretty damn satisfying.

Left to Right: Truman Capote and HP Lovecraft portrait. Acrylic on panel. 2017

I recognize that, when I set out to make something, I ascribe to it a show that it will be in, or a competition it will be submitted to. There is always a clear something that should be tidily checked off on a list that I’ve made for myself. I see the application and the venue in my mind before sitting down to simply make. If the ultimate home for a piece isn’t known, I don’t make it. 

After all, larger works are far harder to sell. A couple massive ones still sit in my storage closet, packed neatly with half-popped bubble wrap from seven years and three moves ago. As a father and a busy adult person, I need to be as efficient with my time as possible, I tell myself. 

All pesky practicality aside, this is clearly a limiting way of approaching art. There needs to be room for play, and I am speaking literally in this case. 

Last month, I met a woman who sold me six 5-foot canvases that were each large squares. She was moving from Houston to China to pursue a new business venture unrelated to painting. These pieces were to be part of an epic show she was planning. When the show wasn’t approved by the gallery and didn’t materialize, she decided to sell the canvases. Seeing her post about them online as a sign that I needed to dust off my roller brushes, I picked them up for a quarter of the price that she paid. 

She had already painted several equally large works for this gallery a year prior, but they had not sold. Instead, they are being shipped to China at great personal expense. But such is the price of scale. When I asked her how she felt about this, she said, smiling, that this show was something she simply needed to do, and she's proud that she made it. This compulsive process of making, that stemmed from a need to realize a vision, yielded no regrets. 

This conversation reminded me of something I’ve forgotten somewhere as a painter, that if an artist has something to say, they should say it. I say this in my work, and if the work needs to be large to best communicate this, so be it. If it needs to be small, that’s fine too. So long as whatever idea, theme, question or obsession is rattling in your mind is yet to exist on a surface, say it. There are plenty of external forces that limit one’s practice. An artist should not, themself, be among the forces to stop the inertia of making. 

I encourage everyone reading this to go big as well, you owe it to your work.