These practical considerations, however, were the least of Greaves' concerns, if indeed, they occurred to him at all. In the mini-painting, his interest in size is of a different order, more philosophical and aesthetic. Greaves calls them mini-paintings to distinguish them from the earliest miniatures that enjoyed a vogue in Europe from the 16th to the 18th century, portraits for the most part, which, painted on vellum and replete with arcane symbolism and allegory, proclaim their derivation from medieval manuscript illumination. At times small enough to hold in the hand, the traditional miniature is simply a tiny painting, a miracle of reduction down to the minutest detail. Size as such is unproblematic.
Smallness is all.
Not so the mini-paintings, where the question of size, or more, of scale, becomes the actual point of departure for Greaves' newest investigations. He then discovered, as he worked, that some of the objects described in these paintings were painted at their natural size. Limes, nails, ants, needle and thread, pencils, buttons, an egg, a cherry - all could fit into the composition at their natural size. A natural scale makes the paintings very accessible to the viewer. Moving away from natural scale creates a totally different feeling.