Small scale works are exciting to me for many reasons. I like the intimacy of being able to hold the piece in my hands. The size requires a distillation and clarity of ideas without limiting their importance or power. Working small enables me to trust and follow my instincts and impulses, often combining several separate observations into a single image. As a painter, I try to keep an open mind in selecting subjects, to not be deflated by failures, or take too much pride in successes. I try not to let my creative energy and focus be diminished by the daily challenges and demands of life. From the foundation of works I have already painted, I move forward. Each painting is a journey, unique and complete, like an ever evolving musical score. I feel a sense of excitement always on the verge of discovery. Each work is a new opportunity to see, experience, and reflect. I find working in a small scale in complete harmony with achieving these goals and exploring my own journey. I realize these reflections are very personal, and another artist might make the exact same comments about large scale works. Each artist creates the notes and measures of their own life's symphony.

Sue Wall ©2012

I started painting at the age of three. Now at sixty, time seems an unfair limitation when thinking of the unending succession of images racing through my mind.

I have always felt in harmony with the intimacy of small-scaled works, never underestimating or limiting their tremendous power. My paintings are statements somewhere between reality and imagination, between spontaneous and intellectual control. I often combine several separate observations into a single image, enjoying the relationships between patterns, shapes, cultures.

Small scaled work enhances the importance of maintaining an unfragmented unity of space. Cropping creates a self-enclosed curious tension, complete and contained rather than an artificial limitation. In small works I especially value technical simplicity, directness of medium, uncluttered representation, and elimination of unessential elements. There is a heightened concept of seeing, a sense of spilled truth. The success or failure of each painting depends on my decisions, abilities, challenging me on all levels, using all my capabilities, pushing me into previously unexplored areas.

Each painting feels like a new beginning, provides a sense of excitement as if on the verge of discovery, a curiosity of the unconscious and the predictable. Reality is so abstract, with so many versions, different interpretations, integration of many perspectives, a sort of echo system. My paintings deal with expectancy, growth as well as decay, hints of forces beyond control, the transient nature of life. Often I am driven by impulses I cannot define, painting with my whole being, a life long commitment. When we declare for ourselves what we want in life, it becomes a foundation for what we create.