Country Church Before Storm, watercolor, 6×5 in, originally uploaded by ahtravis.
Sources of inspiration–Shape of the support, again
I have resolved, as have many other artists, to respond to the recession and paucity of sales by painting smaller, and consequently less expensive, paintings. Shape again focuses the mind.
Monday my plein air group was out painting at a small, plain country church. We had spent the morning working on complicated paintings: the church interior through the windows, the church rising above a field of yellow grass, the back of the church at the end of a country lane. Near the end of the session I reached for my pre prepared 6×5” papers. It was about to rain and the sky was dark and threatening. The dark sky set off the white of the simple church steeple and the work was completed quickly before the rain reached us. Very small, very concise.
If your new motto is “waste not, want not” there is a quick and easy way to prepare to paint tiny paintings and not offend any rediscovered habits of thrift. Take a larger sheet of paper, whatever size with which you are comfortable, and run artist or painter’s tape down the sheet dividing the paper into equal parts. Then do the same horizontally. Remember to place two strips of tape at each middle divide so that when you cut the paintings apart you have an equal border on each side. I use colored tape because I tend not to see white tape against white paper.