Study for Still Life with Blonde

‘What’s interesting about scale … is historically still life has a certain reality and scaled to real life generally . . . but it’s as though you are literally looking at the real thing only in painted version. But when you paint real big you’re throwing away that whole pretense. You’re no longer suggesting it’s real life, it’s completely different…it becomes something almost dangerously thin. It is almost like a big blow-up from one of those Italian movies’ (T. Wesselmann, quoted in I. Sandler, ‘Interview with Tom Wesselmann, 1984’, in Smithsonian Archives of American Art Online, https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-tom-wesselmann-12439, [accessed 25 May 2015]).