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At some point,
it seemed to me, that the students who were taken seriously, did
LARGE paintings! I remember Mr. Weidner saying, in his rather "direct"
way to one such student, struggling into the studio with a huge canvas
, "no fool like a big fool!" and then leaning back and roaring with
laughter. In spite of such discouragements, I decided to try a really
big canvas, and there was a certain liberating feeling involved.
After some rather positive critiques on this piece, I submitted it
to the Spring Competitions, and was awarded something called the
Mamie Bux Prize for Still Life Painting. Competitions of this sort,
some people say are destructive- or they say "it's all political"
etc. and there is a lot of validity to those positions. But I know
that when I found out I had won the prize, it was a huge encouragement.
Mainly, I had a sense that important artists - my teachers- were with
me, in a very concrete way, that I was on the right track. This sense
of belonging is critical to us as artists, because rejection is much
more common than "winning."
What I liked about working large, was that it was physical. You had
to wrestle the canvas around, you could load up a palette knife with
a huge glob of paint and slide it across the surface- it was tactile
and satisfying in a way that doing smaller works was not.
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