These days I mainly work small: restrictions of having to work in a chemo chair; working at home when the weather is miserable and I don’t want to risk catching a cold… But as well as these practical reasons working small is intimate and domestic and I work flat/ A review of Lee Krasner’s “Little Image paintings” makes the point that working flat is a vigorous attempt to get away from an easel esthetic. http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/edelman/edelman9-15-08.asp
… something I have been doing for a while but find this an interesting take, even if in other art traditions or cultures it doesn’t have the same meaning, for example in Japanese or Chinese painting where the apparently strange perspective has I think been explained by the fact that the artists worked low, close to the floor.
I have been taking old work, cutting it up, gluing it and have started reworking the resulting configuration, still using some of my favourite paper: Chinese calligraphy practice paper. It is rough stuff and the gridlines are wonky and and inconsistent. It comes in various qualities, some with less size I would think. For me it both references the link between drawing and writing and the Modernist grid, though some of the work is definitely sliding into painting.
