50cm

This is from an interview with Giacometti by Sylvester, where the artist is discussing his practice of painting his sculptures:

… I have to sacrifice the painting and try and do the form. In the same way as I have to sacrifice the whole figure to try and do the head. And as I have the sacrifice the whole landscape to try and do one leaf. And as I have to sacrifice all objects to do a glass. You can only get to do anything by limiting yourself to an extremely small field.

Up until only a year ago I believed it was much easier to draw a tablecloth than a head. I still think so, in theory. But a few months ago I spent three or four days simply trying to draw the cloth on a round table, and it seemed to me totally impossible to draw it as I saw it. I should really not have given up on the tablecloth until I had got a better idea of whether I could do it or not.

But in that case I would have had to sacrifice painting, sculpture, heads and everything else, confine myself to a single room and reduce my entire activity to sitting in front of the same table, the same cloth and the same chair. And it’s easy to foresee that the more I tried, the more difficult it would become. So I’d be reducing my life to practically nothing. That would be a bit worrying, though, because one doesn’t want to sacrifice everything! Yet it’s the only thing one ought to do. Perhaps. I don’t know.

At any rate, since I’ve become much more responsive to the distance between a table and a chair – fifty centimetres – a room, any room, has become infinitely larger than before. In a way it’s become as vast as the world. So it’s all I need to live in. So that has gradually put an end to going for walks. That’s why I don’t go for walks any more. When I go out, it’s to go to the café, which is necessary, and then I prefer to go by car rather than on foot, since it’s no longer for the pleasure of taking a walk. The pleasure of an outing to the forest has completely disappeared for me, because one tree on a Paris pavement is already enough. One tree is enough for me, the thought of seeing two is frightening. While I used to want to travel, these days it makes no difference to me whether I do or not. I am less interested in seeing things because a glass on a table astounds me much more than it used to.