Sturgeon Bay artist Margaret Lockwood prefers large canvases for her impressionistic paintings. Submitted.

People like big paintings, said Margaret Lockwood, a Sturgeon Bay artist known for her large impressionistic paintings that often suggest Door County forests, waterscapes and skies.

Lockwood shrugs off any suggestion that her work would be too big to handle.

“My paintings will fit through a door; I don’t make them bigger than a door,” she said. “They’re 4, 5 or 6 feet, sometimes I do a 7, but not often. Mark Rothko [abstract painter] said big paintings make people feel as if they are almost walking into them.”

The modern condos of Door County with open-plan designs often have tall walls that need big paintings, said Lockwood, who gets repeat business from collectors and often from their children who are setting up their own households. 

Photographs can also fill up large wall spaces. In the entry lobby of Bridgeport Resort in Sturgeon Bay, photographer Paul Haan installed a display of color photos of the Michigan Street Bridge, 16 feet wide and 5 feet tall. 

Paul Haan of DoorCo Photo Gallery made this photo display in the lobby of Bridgeport Resort in Sturgeon Bay. Submitted.

The prints, made on aluminum, sparkle in the subdued lighting of the resort’s interior. By contrast, in the afternoon sun at Haan’s DoorCo Photo Gallery on 3rd Avenue, the aluminum acts like a mirror, he said.

Around the lounge are 30-by-45-inch prints on aluminum, while the hallways have 20-by-30-inch prints and 20-by-54-inch panoramas.

“We’re trying to show our guests what they can see and experience in Door County,” said Jim Choe, the resort’s project manager.

While some are trying to fill large spaces, personal preference prompts other art buyers to go big. Ginnie Cappaert – who owns Cappaert Contemporary Gallery in Egg Harbor, exhibits at Edgewood Orchard Galleries in Fish Creek and is a partner in Materiality gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico – likes the look of a big painting that dominates a wall.

Egg Harbor artist Ginnie Cappaert spent much of her winter painting at her studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Submitted.

“From a design standpoint, my personal opinion is that the biggest design error one can make is to put too small of a painting in a large space,” Cappaert said. “In fact, I prefer an oversized painting even on a small wall or in a smaller space.”

Over the winter, she was mostly working on large paintings at her Santa Fe studio.

“Painting large offers a certain freedom and expansiveness that I prefer, even if it is more physically demanding,” she wrote from Santa Fe before returning to Door County recently. 

She had just finished a diptych that measures 5 by 8 feet for a client’s new multimillion-dollar home in Idaho.

“This couple walked into Materiality and fell in love with my work, but needed something large,” she wrote three weeks before leaving New Mexico. “We worked together on what they liked in my work, and I’ve been working on it for months.”

Near Cappaert Contemporary Gallery in Egg Harbor, David Keel exhibits some 64-inch square paintings at Woodwalk Gallery.

“The Town” by David Keel, a Chicago artist showing at Woodwalk Gallery in Egg Harbor. Submitted.

“Bigger paintings have become pretty popular in Chicago,” said Keel, who likes brushes 2½ to 4 inches wide. He likes the dynamic of mixing a large stroke with a small stroke, and knows how to get detail with a large brush.

“Often, people think the artists are using a small brush to do details, but a lot of times, it comes from the large brush, because [with] so many intricacies within the brush, you can get a lot of details,” Keel said. “With the painting I am working on now, the bristles on the 2½-inch brush have gone stiff, so it scratches the surface and the paint underneath comes through.”

Marc Anderson – a landscape painter who exhibits at Edgewood Orchard and his own M. Anderson Gallery on 2nd Avenue in Sturgeon Bay – also likes well-used brushes. He has quite an array, mostly around a half-inch, including some old, chewed-up brushes with stiff bristles that can provide really interesting texture. He can achieve a similar effect with a calmer, a brush with different length bristles that produces a feathered brushstroke.

For Anderson, 36 by 46 inches is a comfortably big size for a painting.

“I’ve done a couple larger than that, but then the price gets into territory where your market share shrinks a bit,” he said. “Plus, large work is a problem to store and expensive to ship.” 

One of his recent large paintings was damaged in shipping, and he had to repaint the whole thing.

“I was not terribly thrilled about that,” he said.