If you're not familiar, the tiny home movement has been gaining a lot of traction over the past few years. People have become fed up with paying high mortgages, and they've been looking to downsize to live life a little more simply. Most of these people get obsessed with building their own tiny home and can do so using less than $9,000.
I recently came across a photo of a tiny house built by Brooklyn artist Amy Bennett, but this wasn't just a tiny home. This was a minuscule house.
Amy Bennett builds models of small, fictional communities using materials such as cardboard, foam, wood, glue and other crafting supplies. She has built intricate, detailed models of a variety of locations including neighborhoods, lakes, theaters, churches, and more. As she says on her website, "The models become a stage on which I develop narratives."
After the models have been built, Amy creates gorgeous oil paintings. You can see samples of her work, including many other incredible installations, on her website. Maybe the "tiny homes" in Bennett's artwork are uninhabitable, but they're still stunning creations.
Please SHARE these photos with friends!
Most of these images come from Bennett's "At the Lake" series, which features picturesque scenes near one single lake.
She says that she is "interested in the fragility of relationships and people’s awkwardness in trying to coexist and relate to one another."
Born in Portland, OR, Bennett received her BFA from the University of Hartford, and she got her MFA from the New York Academy of Art.
She uses her miniature 3-D models to inspire further oil paintings, but they're incredible pieces of art themselves.
She explains: “Developing a scene in 3-D gives me complete creative control and helps me to process and extract bits of my experience in order to make what is intuitive and dream-like something more concrete and real."
Building the 3-D models allows her to see the effect that real light has on her imagined locations. She can see how shadows would really appear in that environment.
She even took time to change one of her models from summer into winter to see how it would affect her work.
She told the New York Optimist, "Two years ago, I constructed a 1:87 scale model neighborhood, a fictitious cluster of 11 houses depicted through model railroading miniatures, styrofoam, cardboard, and plastic, complete with string telephone wires and working lights…"
Her work has been getting a lot of attention. Many periodicals have covered it, and she's been displayed with solo shows in galleries all around the world.
Her work can sell for upwards of $30,000 apiece.
Look closely. Is this a painting, photograph, or model?
This artist makes tiny art that makes a big impact.
Please SHARE with a friend today.
