chriswoodartist

I am launching a new series of work and deciding upon the scale and format is always a DILEMMA.
In fact there is a new dilemma at every turn. As a former illustrator, life was simple – you knew the dimensions of the book jacket and scaled up the artwork so it was “half up” (50% bigger than the printed book) but when doing a speculative piece, the scale could be anything, large or small. Clearly the average collector doesn’t usually have a lot of wall space and experience has told me that smaller paintings are much easier to sell than ones over a metre square. That said, a feature piece is what some people require. In the past I used to sell 5’x 6’ paintings that hung above the clients fireplace or perhaps in their office. More recently, I have enjoyed making postcard sized paintings because I can complete them much quicker than a large piece that could take months to create. Postcard sized paintings (5” x 7”) sell as they are a bargain at £175 and it makes them accessible to a wider audience. In terms of format, I like landscape where the height is the smaller dimension and the width is the larger dimension. So no DILEMMA there ! As a former shop keeper, I have a shop keepers mentality and always have a number of stretched canvasses “in stock” and these tend to be the popular sizes so again – no dilemma. The issue comes when I start to think in commercial terms and that’s never a good thing for a fine artist, when the subject matter and the proposed impact should dictate the scale.
My question to you “dear buyer of paintings” is this – “what specific size of painting would you buy and why ?
Currently, I have six postcard sized seascapes and one landscape painting (20”x24”) underway in my ArtSpace studio. All seven images are oil paintings.
When I work in watercolours I don’t have to wrack my brains about scale because I work in a sketchpad that’s usually 10”x7” (25×17.5cms), although recently I have been working bigger at 12”x9” (30.5×22.5cms). I gave up working in watercolours on a large scale because to avoid the paper from cockling (warping) the larger individual sheets of paper need to be stretched and this is both time consuming and a pain. Returning to the format, I quite like a square format and used to always buy square sketchbooks that were 195mm square – these were great for plein air (outdoor) sketching, where you don’t want to be too encumbered ! That said, I have known some artists who lug enormous canvasses around the countryside : each to his or her own !