Plate tectonics

No sooner had I finished my "Blue Plate Special" -- after wrestling with how to position the plate -- then a plate appeared in a painting every time I opened an art book. I saw them flat, flat with objects on top, tilted, stacked, upright, dead centre, moving out of the picture...what else?

This world of possibilities rekindled my long-standing interest (dating from the time I bought the blue plate) in doing a series of paintings, each with a different coloured plate. I have some odd plates but none with a gorgeous design like my thrift store blue plate's. So I decided that in my second painting -- "Orange Plate Special" -- the rich pattern element would come, not from the plate itself, but from accompanying objects: a small Mexican dish and a piece of fabric. I did a small study with these three elements, and overall I thought the composition would work.



Guess what? It didn't -- and this became evident rather early in the process. You can follow its evolution here and watch a fourth object recruited almost at the last minute to fill some space. Not the way I like to work -- but here's what we have so far in The Plate Series: "Blue Plate Special" and "Orange Plate Special" .

After I pulled this off (more or less), I recalled a comment by Matisse in a wonderful collection of his writings I've recently discovered. Originally, his point about "squaring up" didn't entirely make sense to me, but I see now that "Orange Plate Special" -- in its small 5" x 7" study versus the finished 15" x 20" version -- is an example of just what he talked about. The guy knew his business!

"Composition, the aim of which should be expression, is modified according to the surface to be covered. If I take a sheet of paper of a given size, my drawing will have a necessary relationship to its format. I would not repeat this drawing on another sheet of different proportions...nor should I be satisfied with a mere enlargement....An artist who wants to transpose a composition from one canvas to another larger one must conceive it anew in order to preserve its expression; he must alter its character and not just square it up onto a larger canvas." (- Matisse, Notes of a Painter, 1908)