The scale of the current show at Whitney Art Works feels large -- about 300 pieces -- but the works themselves? Little bitty.

Michael Branca took 13 works of art that are really big -- he calls them the "greatest hits of art history" -- and made them really small.

The Bath artist did painted copies of "American Gothic," "Whistler's Mother," "Starry Night" and 10 others, each less than the size of your average postage stamp. None was larger than an inch in size.

Branca says he wanted to help people get a better look at these classic works.

Huh?

"These are all big, iconic images. We've seen them so much we can't even see them anymore," said Branca, 33, an artist who teaches drawing at Southern Maine Community College in South Portland. "So painting them tiny makes people come back to them and really look at them."

When something is really small, you have to look carefully to really see it. You have to strain to see the details. You have to pay attention.

That becomes immediately apparent when one enters the current exhibition at Whitney Art Works in Portland, aptly titled "Tiny." The gallery's two rooms are filled with the works of 90 artists with Maine connections, who were asked to submit something that would fit in an 8-inch-by-8-inch space.

The show's theme and parameters were thought up by Bruce Brown, who spent 20 years as curator at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport and now curates shows on a freelance basis.

Brown said the idea came to him when he was thinking about curating a show at a very small gallery in New York City.

Brown said he began taking note of Maine artists who might be suited to working on a small scale, as well as those who work large but might like the challenge of thinking small. Brown personally selected and invited the artists in the show.

"I tried to think of people who would have fun with it," said Brown, 67, of Portland. "For me, this was as much fun as I've ever had curating a show."

The show's small scale seemed to bring out a sense of whimsy in some artists, creative wit and cleverness in others.

Consider the works of scrimshaw by Sam Van Aken, a Maine artist who teaches at Syracuse University in New York state. Van Aken likes to assume characters for his work -- a few years ago he did a show in which the work featured images of him as Richard Dreyfuss' character in the film "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

SCRIMSHAW WITH A TWIST

Lately he's taken on the character of a sailor from times past, so scrimshaw, the art of engraving images on whale's teeth, seemed perfect.

But a whale's tooth is not exactly small, so Van Aken picked human teeth.

"I got them from some shady doctor on eBay," said Van Aken.

Van Aken said he took a sewing needle and filed it down to about "a hair's width." Then he donned some jeweler's glasses, the kind that magnify, and he set about etching different images of windmills on each of 10 teeth. He figures he spent about eight or nine hours on each tooth.

He said he picked windmills, at least partially, because of his interest in the fictional character Don Quixote and how he carries "fictions into reality." Quixote, thinking he is a knight on a grand adventure, attacks windmills he believes to be giants.

Van Aken often works with bigger pieces. Another piece he did for a show at Whitney Art Works included an 8-foot-by-5-foot utility trailer. Inside the trailer he constructed a replica of a "snug," or small booth from an Irish pub. The installation included a keg of Guinness stout and a bottle of whiskey.

Amy Stacey Curtis, an artist based in Lyman, put together a piece for the "Tiny" show called "Sort." Curtis constructed the piece by laying out 11,664 tiny beads -- about a sixteenth of an inch each -- on the top of a small table. There are nine different colors of beads, and 1,296 of each color. Near the beads are nine little glass containers.

Instructions with the piece ask people to pick up a bead or beads and put them in a container with other beads of the same color.

The beads are so small, it's almost impossible to pick them up with one's fingers. One way to get them is to wet your finger and hope the bead sticks.

"I pull them toward the edge and scoop them. There are a lot of different methods," said Curtis.

Curtis said the idea for the piece came from her interest in exploring light and color, and how people distinguish colors.

FROM HUGE TO 'TINY'

Curtis often works in big spaces. Enormous spaces. In 2006, she staged a show called "Sound" that featured nine interactive installations set up through 26,000 square feet of the vacant Lockwood Mill in Waterville. The installations included one with nine tape recorders on 4-foot-tall pedestals. Another featured nine metronomes on one long pedestal.

She currently has work, including 10,080 wooden discs to be sorted by color, at the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville.

A TALL ORDER

For Tim Clorius, being in the "Tiny" show presented logistical challenges. Clorius did a series of small paintings called "Tiny Giants," based on old black and white photos of tall men.

"You have to really control your hand, because the smallest wiggle will change a facial expression," said Clorius, of Portland. "I probably wouldn't have done this if not for (the show)."

Clorius, who is 6 feet, 7 inches tall, is used to working on larger spaces, too. He does all kinds of painting, but often paints on the public graffiti wall near the water in Portland's East End. When he paints there, with spray cans, one eye on a face might be 6 inches wide. In his piece for the "Tiny" show, the eyes in his paintings are mere specks.

"For me, the skill of painting is a driving force, just practicing and trying to get better," he said. "It's essentially the same as (painting larger images) except the brushes are much smaller."

Branca said that for his paintings of classic art images, he used oil paint because "oils are forgiving."

"You can layer with oils, so you can sort of erase if you have to," said Branca.

Branca's mini art classics were for a piece called "Art History Blender." The 13 mini paintings are in a glass mustard jar that has been fashioned into a mini blender. Branca submitted three other pieces as well, as each artist was allowed to submit up to four. So even though there are 90 artists involved, there are about 300 works in the show. And though most are very small, not all fit the 8-by-8 guidelines set out by Brown. He said he decided to accept some larger images if they have small elements, such as small people in a large painting.

Branca said he likes the concept of the "Tiny" show, because people today probably need to slow down and pay attention more than they do.

"When Bruce asked me to be in this show, I thought it was a great idea. In our fast-food culture, people go by so fast they don't take time to look at things. When something is a quarter- inch tall, you can't do that," said Branca.

FINDING A RHYTHM

Deborah Whitney, co-owner of Whitney Art Works, laid out the pieces in the show. She said she organized all the works on tables and then tried to group them in a way that felt rhythmic, either because of color, or shape or mood. She said that when people come to see the show, they spend a lot of time with it, more than with most shows.

"I think they're intrigued by the scale of it, that so much can be done with so little," said Whitney.

Brown, the curator, likes to come up with exhibit ideas that challenge artists, as well as audiences. He's working on a photo show now where artists will be required to work with the least expensive cameras possible, disposable even.

Brown says the name of a show can have an impact on how artists view it, and what kind of work they submit. If this show had been called "Small," for instance, Brown thinks the feel of it would be different. A lot of things are small in relation to other things. But the word tiny is definitive, and a little funny.

"Tiny is just a word I love," said Brown.

And apparently, many artists do, too.

Copyright © 2007 Blethen Maine Newspapers