Rørpost Diaries

Here is Gitte with work in process, finishing John Bernhard’s collaboration start.

#Gitte Hadrup

#John Bernhard

#Collaboration finish

#work in process

Karine and I started the conversation about the artistic process via facebook. Karine mentioned Gandhi "Let's be the Change." I wrote her and old slogan from Phillips  - "Let's make things Better". These words became the basis for our work together. Sometimes we did show each other our sketches - also via facebook. Although I have never met Karine live - so I think we both felt like we knew each other, when we were finished with the works. It was fun, facinating and exciting to receive the other's work and thoughts. I tried to respect my artist-partner's color palette, lines and expression. While I tried to add something new. It has been a great experience – Let´s make the Idea Global!

“Connected”:  Kay Sarver finishes her collaboration piece: read more on her thoughts at http://www.kaysarverart.com/-blog/other-projects

This is what I sent Jette Dümke when we started:  Materials - Graphite

Shifting sands are always moving, traveling, from one shore to another. Passing miles and miles tossing back and forth, stopping to rest then picked up and moved again. Growing evolving changing, yet still connected.

This is my thought with her piece:

Materials - Cotton painted with MX fiber-reactive dye. Mosaiced: with acrylic mediums.

Looking to the horizon where the land meets the sky blurring the lines with color. Sharing their space coexisting.  Moving, evolving, changing, yet still connected.

Attached are photos of work in process.

This has been an interesting challenge for me, to say the least. I have collaborated with other artists in the past, but we have always done our own separate piece, either in response to each other’s work, or we each created around a chosen theme. Working on the same piece with another artist poses a few new challenges. One is knowing how much to do if you are the artist starting the piece. There really are no rules here, and that happily coincides with the nature of an artist, so it follows that this has been more than interesting to see what others have created to send to their collaborative partner.

My working title was "Rain Day” and I started this the day Tropical Storm Bill was scheduled to make landfall in Houston. I had been released from work because the city was "hunkering down," anticipating flooding and winds. But although this storm looked terrible on radar and was on the heels of terrible flooding a few weeks prior, this storm came through as mild, with just a few pleasant showers. I captured gentle rain patterns in various media that afternoon. I love naturally occurring chaotic patterns, especially when they are indexical like this, leaving a record of what has happened. It also makes me very happy when it's raining, and I can hole up at home without having to go anywhere. Of course I don’t want devastation, but I'm grateful when nature gently interrupts the daily patterns of the city/business. Somehow, my life just feels more "real" to me then.

One of the most "homey" things in my art vocabulary is incorporation of needle arts. So, I took various bits of the patterns, embroidered a "blanket stitch" on the (heavy watercolor paper) pieces to be joined, and then crocheted them together, so that this it references quilts/blankets and domesticity. So it becomes "Rain Day" - something for him, literally of Houston and of me. I know the artist I’m paired with works primarily in bronze figurative sculpture, so I thought it would be a fun, and kind of funny, contrast to send him something with pink thread in it.

One of the Danish organizers, Sue Reeves, who is actually Canadian, let me know she got the spirit of this piece, because it is a “Snow Day” in Canada that brings things to a halt. She said she also thought it captures unplanned "hyggeligt," a Danish concept of cozy and more, which she finds to be a key element of Danish life.

Material: Inks, Crayons, Watercolors on paper

Process: Brenda Schloesser wrote to me, that she lives close to Galveston Bay, a great place of peace and rest by the ocean.

As one of the project organizers, I had early insight to the entire first round of collaboration starts. I found it very interesting to see the variety of ways artists tackled the problem of setting up a piece for their collaboration partner to finish. 

Some strategies included:  leaving exactly half of the piece blank, leaving only smaller area blank and/or taping off to create small voids, working only in pencil (choosing a layout but no color), or working over the entire piece, so that the partner finishing the work had to make all decisions about what should stay and what should go. And some teams communicated frequently on strategies, thoughts, and progress, while others had minimal communication.

"Let's be the change we wish two see in the world." That was how Karine Parker Lemoyne began the conversation with her art partner Lotte Lambæk, about the artwork they had committed to collaborate on. The words flowed easily between them as they engaged that first conversation. The two artists are inspired by the same vibrations. In fact they have both a personal slogan that has strong commonalities.