Tiny Homes opens today at Light Grey Art Lab! Naturally, I was super excited to be accepted into this show. Buildings? Tiny things? What's not to love? As what often happens after I receive a prompt though, I spent a while spinning my brain trying to come up with a concept. Buildings are a subject-matter that I deal with often and I really wanted to push myself. Did it even need to be a building? A home isn't necessarily a building.
I kept coming back to the idea of Earth being our tiny home. It's something that my mind often wanders off and thinks about. I'll think about how big the country is....then the world....and the depths of the oceans....and then the galaxy.....and then ten minutes has gone by and I snap myself back to Earth.
This piece was also influenced by my recent travels to Iceland (also with Light Grey! Post about this forthcoming....I finally uploaded all of my photos to my computer). I was in awe of the beautiful, vast landscapes of this country and kept feeling very small, but also very safe. There's a cozy melancholy that I hoped to convey through this piece.
Squares are a very challenging dimension for me to work in and I spent a while fiddling with this composition. The last time that I had to work in a square format I turned it into a circle ha It also started out far more colourful and I muted it down as I incorporated more of the deep space idea and wanted to focus more on the textures. I'm still quite fond of the hills and sky on the version on the right, though.
I thought of the triptych idea while I was in a meeting at work and spent the rest of the meeting doodling these thumbnails. Once I broke out of the square format it all fell into place nicely. It wasn't going to be a sequential piece at first but these ended up being my favourite thumbnails and I really liked the story that they hinted at.
