The Arizona, Colorado, California, connection
About a year and a half ago I got an email from an artist, Sue Coffey Almand after she had seen my work on the Western States Arts Federation website. Both Sue and I have been using water as the subject matter of our landscape paintings for some time. After emailing some, we decided to see if we could work on a show together, and then I suggested a third artist, Catherine Ruane, an artist whose work that has focused more landscape that lacks much water, whom have come to know through face book.
Sue lives in Colorado, Catherine lives in Arizona, and I live in California. We thought it would be fun to work on a traveling show that could be seen in each of the states where we live. We worked on a theme, “States of Confluence” which embodies several “pods.” Each of us worked on ideas about what came up for us when we thought of water, in metaphorical terms, physical terms and ecological terms then depending on our individual inclinations, we chose various pod themes to focus on.
Our first endeavor is working on a collaborative piece, and since we live far apart, all communication with the exception of the one time that I met with Sue in person, has been done electronically or by phone. For our collaborative piece, we chose to work from a photograph that we voted on, gridded that photo into a grid in which each one of us would get three individual images to work from that grid. We decided that we would use paint, and that the surface of each image would be a 20″ x 20″ cradled panel and that we would use paint as our medium. When shown together as one image, our individual paintings will be interspersed within the total grid so that none of us shows any work in succession.
I thought that I would not be able to begin until mid October, but decided to take a break from some of the other painting that I was doing and to focus on our collaborative piece. Having recently completed my multi painting for the 50-50 show at the Sanchez Art Center, the grid format is like renewing an old friendship, with form and color, reiterating the relationship between landscape, abstraction and representation as well as starting off on a long term trajectory of thoughts, ideas and collaboration with two excellent artists.