Feeling small

Awe and the power of composition and scale

My favourite way to feel small… running in wild weather amidst gigantic landscapes and mountains.I think this is my favourite ‘self portrait’ I have made :)

Feeling small

I keep thinking recently about feeling small. How it can be both an awful feeling and also something absolutely wonderful.

I am quite a small person - and sometimes feel quite invisible. I seem to have the a weird knack of not triggering automatic doors to open, I can’t reach the top cupboards of our kitchen and I look up to chat to most of my family, literally. I sometimes feel, like I think perhaps a lot of people do, a little forgotten. I have lately (or perhaps not just lately) felt small politically, like the voices of people like me are not heard by those in power. Sometimes in this context the feeling small is heartbreaking. I also feel small when my work doesn’t seem to be working as I want it to, or when it is not received by the world with the wonder that my ego desires.

However, I also think that feeling small can be possibly my favourite thing about being alive. Feeling small can quash that nasty ego. Moments where my sense of self is silenced by the wonder of the world around are so peaceful and completely invigorating. I think in this way feeling small, is part of the wonderful life affirming experience of awe.

I made this piece just the other day as part of Folktale Week on instagram responding to the prompt ‘Lost’. I really like it. I was trying to be more ‘painterly’ in my work and I like that about it. I also like how it evokes a sense of feeling small and does this in a way that is not really positive or negative. Just a fact.

Awe and art making

I read something recently, that the way to improve our lives as humans, both our physical and mental health, was for us all to learn how to find awe in their lives. The premise was something about awe being essential to human wellbeing. That it’s somehow calming and inspiring at once. That it fixes the nervous system as well as offers joy and connection. And that it can be found everywhere from the more obvious vastness of an ocean or a sunset, to a more close to home smaller moments like the sparkles of light in a raindrop. I can’t actually remember where I read the article but as I read it, I realised that perhaps I am an awe addict.

I think my whole life revolves around finding awe. Maybe this just means I’m super lucky (definitely true) or maybe it means I’m in trouble (sometimes I think I am as I am absolutely useless and feel like I might explode if I ever find myself trapped in a place like an ugly room with flourescent lighting and no windows). As I read the article though, I realised that awe is definitely something I spend a lot of time with. It is something that drives my decisions, and also something that definitely inspires and drives my picture making work.

The Scottish Highlands are the epitomy of ‘awe’.

I think perhaps this yearning for ‘awe’ is part of why we are currently living in Scotland. Heading out into the epic Scottish landscape feeling small in that fabulous awe driven way is almost impossible to avoid. The Scottish landscape regularly feel immense. The weather here is usually not something you can ignore, but something that hits you - it demands to be noticed.

One of my earliest attempts at putting tiny houses in big landscape after one of my first trip to the Scottish highlands

Tiny houses, tiny people, scale and composition.

I think, it wasn’t until recently that I realised I could try to capture ‘awe’ in a drawing or painting. Yet awe had long been what I think motivated me to get out my camera. So I started looking through my photographs to see what it was that was working best at capturing that feeling and realised there were always a few different things going on.

One, was that the weather was obvious, was acting as a key element in the story (I wrote about the power of weather to help create mood in drawings here). I think also, when the weather is wet and the world is what lots of people call ‘gloomy’, colour is just so much richer. The reds and blues and yellows all gain a depth that is just not around when things are dry and I think rich deep colours always stop me in my tracks and make me present in the moment, another key effect of awe. I don’t love the colours above but they were I think my first attempt at portraying the rich colours of a late autumn Scottish landscape.

I think the second that was going on, was that there was something ‘human’ in the image to highlight the scale - perhaps a very obvious and key element to taking any kind of photo - but I think something I had played less with when I drew. This can literally be a human (like my favourite picture I’ve made in a long time at the top of this email), or a house or vehicle or even a fence line or path or light post.

The wondrous gigantic landscape that is the Isle of Skye. Possibly the most awe inspiring place I have ever been. Spot the tiny people!

So I’ve played a bit lately with trying to make humans look small in different settings in my drawings, just like I would do in a photo. Walking right near my home in Stockbridge in Edinburgh there is a bridge that makes me constantly feel wonder. It stretches high above a spectacularly steep valley filled with the Water of Leith and beautiful trees. I enhanced the drama of trees when I made the image below to really try to capture the feeling I get when I walk through this part of town and how wonderful it is to feel small amongst something so magnificent.

An attempt at capturing the feeling of awe I experience everytime I walk up the river from our apartment in Edinburgh, along the beautiful Water of Leith to Dean Village.

Another thing that I think was key to the photos I have taken that I most love that create a feeling of awe is where the horizon line is in the image. I realised as I looked through my pictures that the horizon lines in the ones I liked the best were all quite extreme - either way up at the top of the frame, or way down at the bottom.

The power of the horizon line to enhance scale

I haven’t plaid much yet with the horizon line in this way in my drawings but it is something that I am going to do in my artwork in the future. I think it can add so much drama to the image by making a horizon line extreme and really push the sense of scale.

The image at the top of this email, ‘a self portrait’, of me running amidst some epic Scottish mountains, is one of my more favourite attempts to capture the joy and wonder and awe of feeling small. It works I think because the human in the image is tiny and I think because there is a sense of distance and weather that makes it feel like there is a world extending beyond the picture.

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I realised the other day when I was feeling down about the world and my work and my ego was a little damaged and I felt a bit small and lost that by far the best antidote was to go out for a run up the beautiful hill in the middle of Edinburgh. It was raining. The wind was blowing. And I stood up in the clouds soaking wet and felt tiny. The sky was huge, the colours rich, and the city felt distant and far below. I felt small and thus not very important, just very lucky. And the world became absolutely spectacular.

Tiny houses, tiny human and a spectacular large and rich world.