Super-small paintings can show what is essential to landscape imagery. While easily dismissed as trickery and pure technique, the essentials of the landscape are there to see: receding space and diverse patterns. Although most landscape painting is purely descriptive––not so expressive––artful landscape painters are inventive in their interpretations, some quite innovative, their innovations influencing other painters. 

    Super-small painting employs various techniques and methods to simulate nature. On this page, the imagery employs brushwork as well as smudging and fingerprint markings to achieve a landscape appearance. As brushes are used, their properties change, and the tip of the brush changes shape. Each small brush has its own properties for mark making, owing to the alignment of hairs at the brush tip. As a brush is used, microscopic particles of paint accumulate at the brush’s tip, changing the way paint flows through the hairs to the paint surface. Therefore, painters must be aware of changing brush properties, taking advantage of brush behavior at the moment.  

    Just as we may look at nature through a magnifying glass to see its intricacies, small paintings draw viewers into images, like a view from a magnifying glass. To take in a small image, viewers must commit. The relationships between the viewer and the images is quite personal, pretty much one viewer at a time. Highly articulated painting imagery can be like a jewel, compact, dense and weighty.