Scenic Art for the Theatre, 2nd Edition

Chapter 1

Training and Working as a Scenic Artist

Being a scenic artist is an unusual and highly rewarding career. One thing that makes scenic artistry unusual is the physical scale of the work. Stage paintings are often enormous relative to an artist’s canvas. One-thousand-square-foot canvases knocked out in one, two or three days (or even hours) are not the stuff of everyday life, except for the scenic artist. Another thing that makes scenic artistry unusual is the apparent anonymity of the artist to the public. The fact that the apparent “credit” for the canvas goes first to the scenic designer may seem odd. Imagine Michelangelo allowing his staff to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel from his sketches—it’s unfathomable. Yet the value ...