The Making of Miniatura Maxima Art Gallery

When I started the idea of miniatures I wasn't planning on being involved in any other activity except for weaving. However, I had to create miniature interiors to feature my textile work so I made lot of furniture and accessories for some of which you can find full tutorials on Facebook page Mira's Miniatures, https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064200906049

I struggled with wall art since I am not a painter and stealing images from internet didn't seem right either. I also have great qualms about using AI for artistic endevours as I think technology should be used to do chores we hate and leave us to do the fun stuff. I couldn't quite figure out how to go about framed artwork in my miniature domiciles.

It was about at that time that I renewed my friendship with a high-school friend Nada M. I had no idea she had artistic talents and when she showed me her drawings and paintings, I was very impressed. By now she had participated in art shows and became a member of art association, proving herself to be on a level of a professional artist. I was amazed at her powerful depiction of human emotion in the portraits she made in variety of techniques. Her life-size work can be viewed at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61566535844102 at her Nada M. Art page. .

I wondered would she agree to collaborate on miniature art and, to my great pleasure, she found such endevour quite interesting and agreed immediately. There began an exciting voyage that brought us to Maxima Miniatura (the Great Miniature) and further developed our friendship after so many years.

As she experimented with mediums and techniques, I experimented with the ways to display her art, and found that putting them in various rooms, as appealing as it was, is not enough. Her delicate work needed a proper gallery. Context is everything.

It is a harsh reality for many artist painters that their work will never see a gallery. One artist told me he brought his painting to a gallery and the owner took him to the back room and showed him hundreds of paintings waiting for the chance to be displayed. Galleries are expensive to run and advertise, and most artists exhibit their work in various other ways. Thankfully, internet has provided ways for artists to show their work to the world, as it also opened so many difficulties with their work being stolen either by unscrupulous individuals or AI.

It is at that juncture that I realized the appeal of miniatures: you can do whatever you want! Wanna have a castle? Build one. Dream of a perfect room? Make furniture and repaint the walls as many times as you wish. Need a gallery? Just create it in your bookshelf. The beauty knows no size and scale, and art is no less beautiful when shrunk twelve times.

From the get-go I wanted the gallery to have contrasts in every sense: the walls are painted a very solid and smooth teal, but the texture of the walls is uneven as in cement walls. Then the dark teal is contrasted with bright and smooth copper finish of the shiny ceiling. The flooring, made of real vinyl tiles (and that was an ordeal!) is neutral and grounds the space. The whole design is very urban and human-made, but I wanted it to depict nature somehow, so I started creating additions: the cut-out at the back wall to resemble mountains was the first step, and a strip of LED lights helped to make it stand out. The shattered tempered glass provided waterfalls, and glass pebbles made a "river" flowing across the room.

It happened that, as I was finishing the gallery interior, I was also visiting Lepenski Vir, a prehistoric archeological site in Serbia, situated right on the banks of the river Danube. The visit left deep impression on me. The site was preserved under a humongous "bubble" where visitors can enter and see the foundation of number of small habitat structures in what once must have been a community. Each foundation showed a fire pit and had a stone carved idol. It is still not clear was this fireplace ritual or practical, and how these huts actually looked like, but the habitat itself shows a social structure, with biggest huts in the middle and closest to the water, and smaller ones around it.

The stone idols were preserved and are now kept on site and partially in the National Museum in Belgrade, but there was also a gift shop with small replicas of these idols, and I was beside myself to be able to buy them. Although they are not a 1:12 scale (more like 1:6) I knew they had to go into my gallery and create yet another contrast, one of our history and present, with crude art of humans from eight thousand years ago, with sophisticated and gentle contemporary art of my friend Nada. The material, form, and technique may be different, but the need to speak through art has not changed and continues to be one of the most important forms of expression we have.

As Nada finished a series of watercolours (and it cannot be stressed enough how demanding watercolours are on such small scale, but that's a whole another blog), we discussed all our ideas on how to present them so they can show their beauty in proper context. We designed the frames and got them 3D printed, then hand-painted and distressed them; we carefully chose how to size the matting, and cut it as close to the real one as possible (very delicate operation: the real matting is punched with a tool and has perfect corners and angled edges, but we had to cut ours by hand; it took a bit to get to the proper technique). Then we discussed various interior design options and how to situate the paintings. We opted for contemporary interior design although some paintings would fit perfectly in traditional interior as well.

Taking photographs is a whole another skill set which required a steep learning curve and lot of equipment but I was so committed to do justice to Nada’s work that I enjoyed the whole process immensely.

The results are now posted on Miniatura Maxima page on this site. I hope this to be just a beginning, and that Nada’s inspiration will gift us more of her beautiful paintings, while the gallery may yet provide different context for them. Being an artistic structure, gallery has even more freedom to experiment than residential interior.

I look forward to all the ideas yet to come, and invite you to keep following on gallery's Instagram and Facebook where Nada posts her latest ideas and work.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/miniatura.maxima/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61566936176127

You can also buy her miniature paintings in MiniWeaving Etsy shop.