Spent much of Friday unloading canvases, and my post in theframe shop has a view of the Big Canvases (You know, the 48 x 72’s and up.)

It’s making me itch. A sort of artistic pavlovian response is in force. Show me a big canvas, and I start to salivate and get urges to paint something huge and abstract.

This is not a good urge to start having when one is living in 500 sq feet. Particularly not rental square feet, where people frown if I get all Jackson Pollocky on the carpet. Actually, I think that’s part of the reason–something about living in small spaces makes me want to work huge. I used to work on 24 x 48 masonite back in our tiny 420 sq ft place in St. Paul, even if it meant propping the board up on the couch and kneeling on the floor in front of it. Whether it’s basic perversity, or something more complicated–the desire to have a big inner landscape to counteract the small outer one, say–I couldn’t tell you.

Still, I think working big may be good for abstraction. There’s a kind of dignity leant by sheer mass. Elephants would be absurd if they were the size of goats.

Well, it worked for Lichtenstein, anyway.

Don’t be ridiculous, my practical self says, rolling its eyes. You know you can’t do abstract art worth a damn, and even if you could, your fan base is built of people who like funky representationalism. You’d never finish it, and even if you did, it wouldn’t sell, and you’d be left with a monster canvas of dubious quality, and where are you going to put it?

Oh, get bent, sez I.

I wasn’t using that corner of the living room for anything, anyway. Except walking, and meh.

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