Postage stamp-sized art: why we're so taken with all things tiny

The World Federation of Miniaturists will be exhibiting tiny artworks in Johannesburg this month. Leigh-Anne Hunter spoke to some of the makers of small-scale paintings to find out why small is beautiful

Chrysoula Argyros’s art is a smidge the size of the framed photographs that tell her history in her Illovo home. Photos of her five grandchildren; her parents - poor cotton farmers who came to South Africa when she was two. But they also tell a story.

As she peels the bubble-wrap from one of them, I find myself holding my breath, the way we do, for some reason, when we study small things.   

Argyros started painting diminutive portraits - some the size of a postage stamp - at night, “when the children were asleep”, after helping her husband, George, in their butchery. “It’s not a small painting. It’s a miniature,” she says. “You can’t just look at an image of a fly and scale it down. It has to have every hair on it. There needs to be more intense detail.” Her eyes look enormous behind her thick glasses.

“A human head 230mm high must be rendered 38mm or less,” she reads from an exhaustive rule-book. “The outside measurement of a framed work must not exceed 170 x 170mm IN AREA…” Some artists are put off, she says. “It’s got to be quite perfect and that’s what appeals to me.” 

Every miniature paintbrush in her studio is in its place. They’re virtually hairless, which necessitates painstaking paint-dipping. “There are times,” Argyros says, “that I have to remind myself it’s midnight. I’ve been so busy.” Her works are exhibited globally, particularly the US, where a painting the size of a cent can fetch more than 1,000 US Dollars. “People have slipped them into their handbags.”

Humanity has had a longstanding fascination with small wonders, from illuminated manuscripts, to the portraits of loved ones in pendants that “soldiers would tuck into their jackets,” says Charmian Kennealy. “People took them as mementos, talismans.” And today, while in a different form, they still have a certain “power” over us.

Kennealy founded The Miniature Art of Society South Africa in 1992 when the art form, after fading out post-photography, saw a revival. Now MASSA has about 80 members. Imagine. Entire communities, from Tasmania to Bangladesh, devoted to the art of the tiny. “The other day, someone gave a fascinating demonstration on a matchstick,” one member says. Some of the art is so small it must be projected onto walls.

“A lot of people would look at a miniature and say, what the hell?” Kennealy says. “It’s a very intimate way of painting. You’re not slapping on a canvas like Jackson Pollock.” There’s an almost paternal feeling you get from “massaging” these “little treasures” in your hand, she says. “A true miniature will take days to complete. It’s an addiction.”

Even better, she says, is that when you move (or die), your life work fits conveniently “in a few shoeboxes”.  Kennealy, 90, has a few of her own. She gets “turned on” from painting miniatures of nature scenes.

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You might assume that someone who buys tiny paintings would also drool over, say, the miniature heads of micro teddy bears (South African Cheryl Moss holds the Guinness World Record for the “smallest commercially available stitched teddy bear”, at 9mm). But there are big divisions within the miniature world. A New York Times article claimed that, for instance, “mini-modern” enthusiasts – those who collect minuscule modern architecture (at a smidgeon of the cost of full-size versions) – “often distance themselves from adult dollhouse collectors, who have a reputation for being somewhat eccentric”. Yes. Because it’s far less odd to play with your tiny Charles Eames chairs.

“I treat my dolls house as a museum piece,” says M, a Cape-based teacher and traditional dolls-house fanatic who didn’t want her real name published. “I cover it with thick plastic to keep off the dust.” If she’s having a bad day, realigning her miniature furniture a fraction of an inch gives her immense joy. “I saved up to buy the R400 lounge suite.” Inside the tiny fridge are tiny yoghurts and a tiny casserole, preserved forever.

M has a smile in her voice when she talks about her first dolls house. “It was quite beautiful... Perfect.” Perhaps it is to feel small again – and innocent – that we’re drawn to small things. They weren’t small, really, when we were seven. We’ve just got proportionately pudgier.

“Call it a god complex, but I get a thrill from choreographing the lives of my dolls,” says one enthusiast. “I could spend days immersed in their world.” Control-freakishness seems to be one trait miniaturists share. “I guess I don’t like big art for the same reason I hate flying,” says one. “All that space could eat you alive.”

Perhaps even for the non-mini megalomaniacs among us, art is better appreciated when it’s not so quick to lift its skirts. Yegads! It’s a chess set on a pinhead (one of Ukrainian miniaturist Mykola Syadristy’s puny creations). Perhaps there are all sorts of paleomammalian processes that are triggered, which makes the man in the corduroy suit peering into the magnifying glass in a miniature museum, part of a macro-artwork, an unwitting commentator on the process of examining art. Perhaps when something’s small, we look closer.

You wonder who has more fun. A mini-artiste says:  “I love shrinking things, all so I can imagine living in them.”

I was once struck by a panoramic photo of the inside of the White House – then I noticed the giant eye, peering in. Perhaps dioramas of the real world provide the only means to see it as it really is. Not to mention satisfying a voyeuristic urge to peek at the presidential potty.

Or is this really just gimmicky stuff, with about as much creative merit as writing verse in chocolate sprinkles? As one collector tells me: “If it was bigger, I wouldn’t buy it.” 

KwaZulu-Natal artist Beth Freeman-Kane, who moulds minute bird figures, says: “I’m a great believer in the significance of small things.” Mini art encourages us to “appreciate the smaller creatures around us”.

Tell that to the bajillions of invisible things that share our space. “We’re not small,” you imagine one single-celled organism piping up. “Have you seen an atom?”

I had cause to think about this when Argyros leaned down to ogle the aphids on her pot-plants. Perfect material, just look how teeny tiny they are. As she said it I thought I saw a giant eye, peeping through her window.

Catch The Miniature Art Society of South Africa’s World Federation of Miniaturists Exhibition 2016 at Hyde Park Corner in Johannesburg from February 16-21 2016.

WATCH: SA artist Lorraine Loots create a miniature painting of a hot dog