Certain periods in history, seem to produce grandiose things. Today we have monster houses, monster trucks, monster burgers, and monster art. These art pieces are huge, great amalgamations, taking up tremendous wall spaces.

This is not the first time that art has been large. For centuries paintings in Europe have rivalled the gigantic, marbled, gargoyled, and gold leafed, monuments and buildings.

But there is a true motive concerning the size of a work of art and it has little to do with aggrandizement. This is the one felt from within the artist, as a requirement of the subject. This intrinsic size, can range from the very tiny to the extremely large.

Some of inner Vienna's enormous buildings house equally magnificent paintings of; violence, religious themes, and the sexual, all in one. All left me as cold as St. Stephen's Cathedral, which is so frigid it could double as a deep freeze. I have great admiration for the beautiful Gothic architecture of London however, as the sweeping lines seem to echo concepts of freedom. In another culture a world away, huge ceremonial potlatch bowls hold offerings of food, in the ceremonial celebrations of the North West Coastal Indians.
Their totem poles sometimes reached the gods; longhouses held many families. `Big' was a necessity.

I can look forever at Toulouse Lautrec's painting,
"In Bed" (1892) or Matisse's "The Sorrows of the King" (1952), one quite small in size, the other nine feet seven inches by twelve feet eight inches..