Under the Influence of Others

While at Monson Arts, I was grateful for the collaboration of four fellow residents. Each listened to my spiel about Berthold Brecht and gesture as expression of state of mind. Each then explored what their default gesture or pose is and sat for a reference photo or two. What I could not foresee was how the fresh connection with each and my awareness of their various practices would affect the way I paint.

And affect me to the point where, on the last day of the residency, I looked at the four completed pieces and wondered who made them.

In my work, I don’t scratch in text and paint over it. I don’t thinly coat pencil drawings with gesso to reveal underlying layers, leaving a piece largely unfinished. I don’t paint meticulous, tiny, greyed out images with annotated  grids of fluorescent colour along a border. I don’t easily embrace a non-vertical rectangle, nor do I paint landscapes.

And yet, in collaborating with four brilliant thinkers, I did all of these things.

It was a good stretch. I feel creatively drawn and quartered.

My next job will be to synthesize these new approaches into my work in a way that makes them my own.