provides a treasure trove of practical techniques and ingenious approaches. In this captivating guide, noted artist
Jane Freeman shows readers, step by step, how to use modified kit components, and found and handmade objects to create intensely detailed miniature constructions.
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September 17, 2005
Observations At Large -- and Small
This theme is a visual analogue to my first blog-a-logue, "Overheard in Passing." I'm always on the lookout for odd visual phenomena seen around town. Please post your own observations of visual paradox here. Two examples:
(1) Role Reversal:
Seen uptown--Young mother and little girl, hand in hand. Mom wearing overalls adorned with colorful patches, hair in two blond, beribboned pigtails. Her 3-year-old in somber gray attire, hair neat and demure. Very amusing. Or scary. Made me wonder what their relationship is like.
(2) Tipping the Scales:
Recently, at Barnes & Noble I crowded into the back of the cavernous, standing-room-only lecture room, to hear John Irving read. I scrunched up to wedge myself between two tall men. My view of the podium was flanked by two large ears, a brown one and a pink one, both soft and velvety like parted theater curtains. Between them, in my telescoped view, stood the tiny author, far far away, his voice hugely AMPLIFIED. On either side of him was an enormous literary poster heralding novels about the very subject of smallness and enormity. On one side, MOBY DICK's vast toothy mouth encompassed not only the dwarfed Pequod, but Mr. Irving himself; on the other side, hapless Lem GULLIVER lay lashed to the ground, guarded by a throng of Lilliputians who, at 6" small, heed standard dollhouse-doll scale. And the subject of the reading? That too involved scale: a BIG book on an extremely intimate subject, once perhaps whispered about behind closed doors, now broadcast to the masses.
A few years ago I wrote a book that deals with scale, The Art of the Miniature (Watson-Guptill, 2002). Ostensibly it is about creating miniature environments out of found objects (e.g., a splinter of wood from a warehouse loading dock becomes a miniature loading dock, fractyl-style!); but in truth the book is about microcosms and macrocosms, and their relevance to human spiritual transcendence.
Recommended reading: The Poetics of Space, by Gaston Bachelard; Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll.
Posted by Jane on September 17, 2005 10:26 AM
