Creativity and Scale

Narrative as story telling plays a part in my small collages.  Often there is a figure, and they are in a place with some objects and there are words that contextualize the emotion or the situation.  Narrative with my bigger works is within process which is what Stewart is talking about on page 56 when she says, “The toy is the physical embodiment of the fiction: it is a device for fantasy, a point of beginning for narrative.”  Beginning with material or an idea and building on that, trying new things, and making new decisions.

 I went through a lot of different ideas of artists who start with a material and build onto it but ended up posting this trailer for the Science of Sleep which uses dreams to explore creativity within a film.

My large work can be viewed from 10 to the 0, the small collages are mostly 10 to the -1, but some collages can be within the 10 to the -2 scale, the size of a pinky nail.  I think about condensing a lot, and I think about relativity of sizes.  Mostly I work small because the material I cut comes from small sources.  If I have an interesting scrap of paper that I want to accent in a piece, I will make the piece a size that is conducive to that so the other elements don’t take away from it.

In this piece “Car” 2019 (Oil and paper on wood), the art it its entirety is 4’ by 4’ but the collage itself is less than 1” by 1”, playing with scale and breaking the elements down to the essentials.  I had the blue car and I wanted it to prevail over the collage and be noticeable among other collages.  It was a challenge because of the size of it.

Also, I just found this picture of me making collages.  It was at the very beginning - maybe my first 10 collages.  This seems to be a good example of how the concept of scale gets warped in my practice.