ANNOUNCING:High Museum Commissions Molly Hatch Plate Painting: "Physic Garden"

I have been itching to announce a very exciting commission I will be working on over the next 5 months for the High Museum in Atlanta! I will be hand-painting over 400 italian plates with imagery sourced from 2 plates in the English Ceramics permanent collection at the High Museum to create a large wall painting installation in the lobby/entry of the museum. Plates are being installed as a painting in a museum lobby! I am so excited that ceramics are being given this kind of attention on a museum level. It feels like a big win!

Here are the two English Chelsea Porcelain plates that I have used as source material for the project surface design. It was exciting to go to the museum and walk the archives to look at the pieces that the museum has that are under appreciated. These plates are incredibly well crafted and I fell in love immediately.

Here is the design I submitted with my proposal. Each circle in this image represents one plate! I will work from this design to hand-paint each plate over the coming months.This process has taken almost two years to make happen, so as you can imagine I am really happy that it is a "go". 

Here you see a "to scale" image. The wall that the piece will go on is 22' high by 17' wide. The piece will almost fill the entire wall, top to bottom in a mural-like plate painting. In order to paint the piece in my 350 square ft studio, I will break up the composition into 8 parts.

This is 15 cases of over 40 cases of plates that will be arriving over the next couple months from a factory in Italy that will be making all the blanks!

Please keep up with my progress as I will be posting on Mondays or Tuesdays each week with progress reports, snafus and successes as the journey of making a plate painting of this scale unfolds over the next 5 months. Right now, I am waiting with my fingers crossed that all of the plates arrive safely and on time, because there isn't much room for breakage. The factory sent me everything they had!

I cant wait to hear your thoughts as this all continues--Happy Tuesday!