we are small

I finished the pieces I'm showing next month at the Cedarburg Cultural Center's You Gotta Have Art group show. It's a good thing the theme is miniatures, because I don't have the elbow room or the time for big projects. (I have all these huge, unfinished, pre-baby paintings and it's just killing me to watch them languish... and to recall that I used to have the wherewithal to experiment on canvases the size of semi-trucks)(Okay, not that big. Motherhood has made me prone to exaggeration).

But anyway! Like I said before, this is a scale I can handle, and I'm quite pleased with how these pieces came out. I sold several pieces like this on Etsy, so I'm guessing people who buy art like this scale, too.

I painted the butterflies directly onto the glass, then, after they were dry, laid them face down on a collaged background.



I love how the paint looks on the reverse side, so smooth and strange and not like paint. But the painted side looks cool, too:



I didn't give much thought to smallness beyond the dimensions of the artwork -- the pieces in the show can be no bigger than 25 square inches -- but I guess I've been fascinated by bugs and birds and other little things for a long time. I like it that they remind me how small I am, too, in comparison.

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