Sunflowers Mini

Sunflowers Mini

Oil on canvas, 3x4, $35 with tiny easel for display
Email me at carrieBjacobson@gmail.com for shipping/delivery options

I am thinking about doing something radical for the Mystic Outdoor Art Festival: bringing only really big paintings and really small paintings.

Journalists I've known have often used something called the Ladder of Abstraction to determine what stories a staff should do and where and how those stories should be played. It's a great name, eh? The idea of the Ladder of Abstraction (which was devised by Aristotle, I believe) is that stories (or words, or ideas, or what have you) can be arrayed in a continuum, with the most concrete at the bottom, and the most abstract at the top.

A good newspaper will compose itself primarily of stories at the bottom and the top, with the middle rungs of the ladder being at a minimum. Readers, it's thought, are most interested in the teeny news (police reports, barbecue dinner schedules, honor rolls) and the most high-flung ideas and think pieces (why five-acre zoning is a terrible idea, why the new crop of politicians thinks it can solve the issues the old ones couldn't, where will technology take us in the next decade, how to help boys perform as well in school as girls).

At any rate, I was thinking of this when I decided to do the very large/very small thing. Of course, I will have to set the tent up in the driveway to see just how this will work, but I am intrigued.

The Mystic Outdoor Art Festival is Aug. 14-15. I will be at the corner of Willow and Main, a good spot, I think, near Tim Horton's. Stop by and see me!