I have been very fortunate in my life to talk to, interview and look at the work of many artists.
It is, of course, because of Miniatura, with which I have been involved for forty years, first as a visitor, then as an exhibitor, then as a reporter.
Miniatura is slightly different from art in the full-size world, for a very good reason. Artists exhibiting at Miniatura are hoping to sell their work to members of the public; in this respect you might consider them to be no different from artists working in full size. However, the shoppers and collectors visiting Miniatura are, mostly, members of the public shopping with their own pocket money.
My goodness, what a difference this makes.
Early in the current iteration of the hobby there were visitors to the show who were representing various museums in America which exhibited miniatures. They came with very large cheque books. You might well say that this is remarkably similar to the full-sized world, where the size of the cheque books is often remarkable.
In the full-sized world the enormous cheque books are often wafted in the direction of items that are questionably art. I recall cliffs wrapped in plastic, piles of bricks, urinals, unmade beds, giant balloon animals, paint sprayed through stencils, coils of old rope…
I’m as sure that you can add a lot of items yourself, as I am that you have questioned whether the item in question was art, or, perhaps, was the ‘artist’ some sort of con artist?
There have been very few con artists of any variety at Miniatura for several reasons. The first is that all exhibitors go through a selection process. I remember talking to Muriel Hopwood, the founder of Miniatura, who was very firmly of the opinion that some would-be exhibitors would never be good enough to make the grade. She expressed the view that visitors who had paid good money to get into the hall deserved respect. The motto of the show is: by miniaturists for miniaturists.
This makes a difference from the start, visitors are shopping with purpose. Whilst this does mean that you may go with every intention of getting stuff for the house you are currently working on, the quality of the show means that there are irresistible exhibits which you rehome because they speak to you as art.
Is it art? If it is intended for a dolls’ house can it be art?
The dictionary has quite a lot to say about art. ‘Skill, esp. human skill as opposed to nature’ is the first qualification. This would seem to rule out many of the ‘found objects’ that pass as art in the full-sized world. Ferrying an unmade bed to a studio from the bedroom, or crowbarring a urinal off a toilet wall, or delivering several hods of bricks from a building site to a gallery, under this consideration, may have more to do with logistics than art.
‘Skill applied to imitation and design’ my dictionary continues. There’s that word again ‘skill’. It’s a very good word in relation to art, it goes on: ‘thing in which skill may be exercised.’
Then it gets right down to the nitty gritty: ‘certain branches of learning designed as intellectual instruments.’
Here you can see exactly why I like Miniatura so much, if the artists have insufficient skill, they won’t be there. The selection process ensures the visibility of skill applied to imitation and design. You only need to talk to some exhibitors for just a few minutes to be left in no doubt of the depth of knowledge and intellect brought to bear on the world in miniature.
You could argue that the whole of miniatures is about skill applied to imitation and design, because the hobby is about replicating something in miniature, convincingly. Notice I say ‘something’ because it can be anything. You could replicate a real house, everything in it and all the people at a moment in time, or you could make a miniature version of something that never existed. Seasoned miniaturists and people with no experience of miniatures at all could tell you whether it was good enough by looking. The skill that had gone into the reproduction could be apparent, up to a point.
If you use a 3D printer linked to a computer on which you can bring up a photograph which can then be reproduced in miniature, is that art? Does it demonstrate skill, or does the skill lie with the person who wrote the computer programme that enabled the reproduction? Does the skill lie with the designer of the 3D printer? Does it lie with the photographer? Is the skill involved in knowing how to put the process together to produce the desired outcome?
Turning to the dictionary to assist us in finding the truth, if we look up ‘craft’ we find fewer words, which are: skill, cunning, guile; a branch of skilled hand work, and ‘crafty’: dextrous or ingenious.
I would describe craft as the necessary skills in any medium to make the medium work to produce the desired object. If I gave you a box of watercolour dried paints and you dug the paint blocks out and hammered them into dust, I’d suggest you were unaware of the craft required to make the medium work. If you knew to wet a paintbrush and rub it on a block to produce colour and then used the brush to apply the paint to a sheet of watercolour paper, I’d say you understood what the craft entailed. If, after many years of skilful practice you could stand before a view and using the medium, transfer an image of the view on to the paper, I’d say you had learned the craft sufficiently to have the beginnings of art. If you could paint the picture to show us something more than we could see with our own eyes, say, the fleeting nature of English summer sunshine, or the majesty of a tall sailing ship, I’d say you were an artist.
This brings us back to the notable absence of con artists at Miniatura. You can tell, not just by looking, but by talking to the exhibitor if it is good of its kind and how much effort has gone into it and whether the effort represents years of acquiring the necessary skill, but there is no way you will splash your hard-earned cash unless it exhibits skill applied to imitation and design.
Miniaturists are particularly good at this because they, themselves, have tried to make art in miniature. This could be anything from commissioning artists in every field, assessing the suitability of the items produced for the end vision and assembling the finished display, to sweeping the plates off the dining room table to make room for the collection of cereal boxes and the big tub of glue and anything in between.
I love miniaturists, they know what they’re on about because they’ve had a go themselves.
For myself I do both art and craft. The art you know about, it consists of getting a convincing representation of a person in a difficult and lasting medium out of my head and into existence by the practice of all the skilful steps that are necessary to make it happen.
I also enjoy paper crafting, specifically making cards, here are some of the latest
very pretty easel cards with precious little to do with me. I buy kits and dies from various manufacturers and put them together. I like the composition and variety of producing something pretty without much thought, it’s a nice change from the brain-taxing effort required to make an original porcelain doll.
In case you wish to emulate me, the wishing well cards are from www.annagriffin.com and they are further embellished with die cuts made by dies cutting out downloadable artwork from www.carnationcrafts.co.uk
As to judging whether what you see at Miniatura is art or craft, or learned craft so skilful it has become art, you can judge for yourself at
Scroll along the header bar and click on ‘All the makers’, you’ll find a great deal of food for thought, which may well translate into a list of artists you wish to visit at the next show which is 10th and 11th of October 2026. The tickets are on sale from May Day, as always I’ll see you there.
In further pursuit of what is art and what is craft and can you do it yourself, I will, as promised, begin a few blogs on all the different ways of making a doll, shortly. I’m just going to finish having a lovely time creating without much thinking, it isn’t my art, it is art done for me so I can craft and it makes a nice change for a while until my head will not let me rest again until a new doll arrives.
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