Blind collaboration
I know I’ve said it before, but I’m really not the collaborating type.
For years, I did theater, and, though I loved the immediacy and the physicality of performing, I was never completely happy creating art with others. Nurturing other people’s egos and negotiating complex hierarchies and relationships should not, in my opinion, be priorities in the already-demanding context of art-making. Collaborating in theater often equated a diluting of talent to my eye. Suddenly 1 + 1 < 2. Combining efforts seemed to mean that no one gave it their all, instead relying on everyone else to pick up their slack.
With this attitude toward collaboration, it may seem silly that I did theater for as long as I did, but I think I was hoping I would one day evolve…! My failure to embrace collaboration wholeheartedly is something I’ve always been a bit ashamed of. It’s a part of me that I long wished I could change.
That said, in the last few years as Becca and I worked on Subjective, I have come to understand that I may not be as bad at collaborating as I thought. Given the right circumstances, I can partner with another artist and make 1 + 1 > 2!
Certainly Becca herself is important to our successful collaboration, but there is more to it. From the beginning, we decided that Subjective would be a blind collaboration. By this I mean that we decided on our subjects and on the sizes of the compositions together, but, beyond that, we had no input in each other’s paintings. We never saw the other’s works before both halves of the diptychs were completed, and we also tried to keep the experiment as scientific as possible. We avoided sharing much information about our families with each other until the series was finished.
This meant that my half of Subjective was entirely mine. Though I was mindful of the fact that it would eventually be paired with Becca’s work, I built my half as a conceptual whole separate from hers. Subjective is a collaboration in which the artistic work is, in all the ways that matter, mostly not collaborative.
photo by Sharon
Except, of course, when it was. There was a tiniest bit of cheating—bits of information slipped out, just as you might expect them to in conversations between two people who were in the process of becoming friends. There’s one instance that I remember in particular because it led to an epiphany for me.
Becca and I happened to be talking about chess at some point early in our collaboration, and, before I could stop myself, I blurted out that my father loves to play chess. I think I may have even said something about her playing chess with him during her photo shoot with him. As soon as the words had left my mouth, I realized that was the portrait that I had to paint of my father, regardless of what Becca did!
To see what Becca and I made of my father and of our families, visit the North View Gallery by 5 February…
Monday through Friday from 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM
North View Gallery
Portland Community College Sylvania Campus
12000 SW 49th Avenue, Portland, OR 97219
RELATED ARTICLES:
- Subjectively Bend
- Portrait of the artist’s father
- I ♥ Becca Bernstein!
CATEGORIES: - Practice - Subjective -
Patricia...
First - the show is amazing and I thought you did a very fine job at the artists’ talk. Today’s blog entry answers one of the questions that lingered with me after the reception. I have stood in front of your work many times over the past week and continue to see new things. This show was a good idea, well executed = a great accomplishment. Thank you and congratulations.
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