How do artists decide what size to paint?

This paintinting is available for sale on my gallery website, click here.

This 20x24 oil on canvas was inspired by gunfire. I've been painting deep in the woods but chose to stay in the open field because of all the deer hunters and shots ringing out around me. Besides, I don’t look good in orange and my easel sticks up in the air and might just look like antlers. For many painters painting out of doors or in Plein air, this is a large canvas size.

The size of canvas an artist uses can be determined by a number of reasons. Usually I'll carry with me a variety of sizes of canvas from 5x5 inches on up and my enthusiasum for the subject will dictate the size. If I feel like I want to do a quick study, I'll use a small canvas. But painter style will often dictate a need for a larger canvas and in this case, that is what happened.

I have two styles I like to paint in; impressionistic where the paint is thick (impasto) and lights and darks are depicted in broad strokes separate brush strokes – and often very loose. But sometimes I like to interpret subjects using expressionistic color – expressing he scene in exaggerated or unusual color and using space and planes or shapes of planes to create depth. And that was what I wanted here. The corn field only needed a few strokes to simulate the picked rows. More would have distracted from the vertical motion of the bare trees and the oak that still clung to its leaves. Too much detail would kill the effect I was after.

Unfortunately but true, sometimes the size is dictated solely by what the artist has on hand. I've painted a number of pictures on a certain size because that was the canvas on sale or there was an old painting I wanted to get rid of by painting over it.