Collaboration

As often as Amb and I have spent time together while working on our own art, we couldn't remember a time when we'd worked collaboratively on one project. Inspired by our individual artistic development over the last year, our conversations during our week together, our trip to Nice, France, and Kelly Rae Roberts, we organized ourselves in Amb's small studio on my last day in Europe and created a piece together. What an excellent experience!

Amb has recently considered the importance of process documentation, and the idea of pictures of the artist at work, so we dutifully photographed our process. Here I am gluing the tickets/brochures/receipts from our trip to Nice to a piece of cardboard, to use as our base. We used gloss medium to glue everything down and varnish it before applying paint. The varnish helps to protect the paper underneath.


The finished base. You can see we used the map of the city, two validated tram tickets, our train tickets to and from Nice, a brochure for the Matisse museum, and the business cards for the place we stayed and the restaurants where we ate.

Using a photo we took of ourselves in a park as inspiration, we sketched out images over the base, then mixed acrylic paint till we got satisfactory hues, and started filling the sketches in. We ended up painting each other rather than ourselves, which was good practice for both of us.


Amb in her studio.


After getting the faces down, we added words that represented what the trip was for us. We liked how the image of us is a form of reflection, considering how much we reflected in our conversations, and really the experience was all about time for each other and ourselves. Using a style learned from Kelly Rae, we wiped the edges of the piece with yellow and turquoise paint, two colors I now highly associate with Nice. We are both extremely satisfied with the final outcome.

Reflection by HLM and ambrella:


And just so you can see the photo that inspired us, here ya go.


Be sure to visit Amb's blog in the next couple of days to see her posting about our trip and this art experience! 

(Edited 12/11/13: Likely due to inactivity, Ambra's blog was unfortunately taken over in November 2011 and turned into something completely different, so this post is lost to us.)