Meet the Miniaturist: Louise Krasniewicz!
We had a casual chat with Louise Krasniewicz on a Meet the Miniaturist Zoominar on Saturday, May 30, 2020.
Louise is an author, educator and a miniaturist. Her work has been featured in several exhibitions in our gallery including BadAss Miniatures and WeeResist. We were also privileged to have her award winning work, Rear Window, on display.
We learned more about her work in miniature, discovered what inspires her and we talked about some of her theories about miniatures.
"I’m interested in the idea of world making...I’m interested in miniatures, as makers, as people who create worlds that they invite you into and then you get to experience their vision of that world."
We talked a bit about her award winning REAR WINDOW, a 1/12 scale replication of the studio set from the 1954 Alfred Hitchcock film.
"If you make a miniature it should be about a story so that you put elements into your scenes that are hints or keys or clues to what your story is but you don’t tell the whole story so that people have a way to enter your world and try and figure out what’s going on."
On her Harry Potter's Greenhouse piece featuring live plants:
"I’m not a skilled artist. I mean I never took art training at all but what I like about miniatures is you have to do everything. You have to be a carpenter. You have to be a builder. You have to be a painter. You have to do plants. You have to do all those things so that's one of the appeals of miniatures, to me, is I don’t think I would be good at any one art form but I like combining all these together."
How did she make all those birds in her miniature replication from this famous scene from Hitchcock's The Birds (1963)?:
"What I love to do when I make a miniature is do the research and then figure out, do problem-solving, like how am I going to do this? How am I going to get this done? That’s where the new technology has really helped me because I don’t want to be inhibited in what I do because I can’t make something."
Regarding technology and the use of modern tools and techniques used to make miniatures:
"What it has done to the miniature world, however, it’s not always positive... because you see now a lot of the kits that are laser cut but you don’t get the beauty of something that is totally handmade... in some ways all this technology will help us value more the people who can make these exquisite things by hand and I hope that’s what happens."
Catch the entire Meet the Miniaturist broadcast here or learn more about Louise on her blogs and websites:
A BIG thank you to Louise for joining us for this call - we look forward to having her back in a future broadcast!
