Larger Scale Genius.
Large scale paintings that maintain their depth and quality while being true to their subject are difficult to create. It takes skill to bring your vision to life when you scale up a creative process such as painting. What do a French Romanticist, a Pop Artist, and a YBA all have in common? Looking at three artists from different periods who produced work at a large scale, why are these paintings successful?
Théodore Géricault
The Raft of the Medusa – 23ft x 16ft
I had no idea how giant this painting is before viewing it in real life at the Louvre. An image made even more famous as the cover of The Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy and the Lash album cover. Ghoulish subject matter aside, the incredible aspect of this painting is the composition. The French Romanticist painters employed a triangular composition in their work and this painting is a paramount example. Human emotions associated with deadly catastrophe: dread, despair, desperation all clamoring to the top of the pyramid with the raft as the base. Each intertwined limb moving our eye to the peak. We are eventually looking away from the light part of the sky toward the blackness of the inevitable. A reverse image to another French masterpiece, Delecroix’s Lady Liberty Leading the people. The best and worst of humanity side by side in the same gallery.
With The Raft of the Medusa, Géricault marries the technical mastery of painting with the emotion of the subject matter, on the grand scale it deserves.
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Sign up and receive our free color Guide: Oil Painters Classic Palette. You’ll get early access to special offers and our interesting monthly digest straight to your inbox. Privacy PolicyJames Rosenquist
F-111 – 10ft x 86ft
Yes, 86ft wide. A billboard painter by trade, Rosenquist leveraged his commercial-art skills to bring us large scale paintings. This monumental painting is housed in it’s own room at MOMA. We’ve become desenitized to the topics in this painting; consumerism – check, military industrial complex – check , are we complicit? – check. Regardless of our modern day cynicism I love the ambitiousness of this painting and the attempt to ask us to look at ourselves as a society. A macro abstraction composed of micro hyperreal elements all tied together compositionally by the namesake F-111 jet.
Jenny Saville
Interwine – 10ft x 8ft
Let’s leave French Colonialism and Military Industrial Consumerism and turn our gaze a little more inward. The works of Jenny Saville illustrate the best in contemporary larger scale painting. Her large scale paintings of intimate subjects enable us to view her level of mastery of the mediums she uses. The raw open spaces (remind me of Bacon), the reworking of the paint and the positioning of the figures and the sense of time lapse and movement. Her ability to draw, and to leave exploratory marks exposed all contribute to the intimacy of her work.
Hear Jenny Saville talk about her art and process: The Art Newspaper. A Brush with… Interview series.
Don’t Limit Yourself
I hope to revisit in more detail each of these artists’ work in the future. Meanwhile, In your own creative practice ask yourself why your works are a certain size? Is this just an arbitrary decision on your part? The size of your studio space might be a factor in the size of works you produce. But even within those bounds the varibles are fairly endless when it comes to the dimesnions of your work. A good way to experiment with large scale works is to work on paper. Be ambitious and start with a large scale drawing. Keep it simple, just a roll of Canson paper and Conté charcoal to begin.