Where Do We Go From Here?

Although mom says that a painting isn't ever truly finished as long as it is in the artist's possession (one reason I have been tempted to remove some of her paintings from her
studio as soon as I feel it's completed,) we feel we have pretty well finished the two paintings we began.

After my last post, having mentioned the need my mom has for writing quotes down, due to Dyslexia and ADD, I noticed that one of the quotes on our painting of her was actually wrong.
She had written "Has in a tale..." as opposed to "As in a tale..."  There was some deliberation as to whether we should correct the mistake.  Was it not a more true portrayal with the mistake left in?  We decided to correct it.  And stepping back, we called it finished.  Having said that, it is still in her studio, as is the other painting, the one of me.

I'm glad we started with two paintings, rather than one.  If we were to judge our experience based on only one painting, we might have made the mistake of assuming any future collaboration would involve a similar process with similar results.  Having made two paintings together though, we have been reminded that it's more than just the two of us involved in the process, the painting itself plays a role. 

The painting mom started of me had much less back and forth.  Mom started and I finished it, with maybe one other trade in between.  Who's to say why, but it felt like a smoother ride.  We didn't have to think about it as much.  Perhaps it's because there was a story already being told.  The painting was of a photo taken of me many, many years ago by a photographer for The Oregonian.  He was out shooting Spring weather/human interest shots and came across me saving flowers from being tossed, as a city landscaper was replacing the Winter flowers in the Pioneer Square area flower pots. We both knew the story, so we only had to focus of choices involving colors and composition.

The painting of mom though, was trickier.  We had much more back and forth.  In the painting of me, a moment in time was the story, but the painting of mom, well, mom was the story. We eventually completed a very good representation of mom's outsides, but we had to figure out how to put her soul in there. The paintings, and our experiences with each of them were very different.

Overall however, talking with mom about the process of collaborating, we both found a few things to be true for both of us, while working on both paintings; 

1. We put much more thought into the process.  Having respect for the work each other had done forced us to also be more respectful of the work we'd done, so we found ourselves  thinking things through rather than just playing with it and seeing where the paintings took us.

2. We had to trust and believe in ourselves as well as in each other.  We had to find the confidence to risk screwing up the others work and trust that we had something to add. And we had to trust that the other would respect our input as much as we had faith in theirs.

3. In some ways the pressure was greater working together, and in some ways it was alleviated.  There was a certain amount of pressure to respect what the other had done, and to compliment it rather than undo it.  There was also a great relief of pressure when hitting a sticking point, one could simply hand the painting over and let go of it.

4. We got a great deal of pleasure out of it, and felt a great bond throughout the process.

So where do we go from here?  Should we continue to collaborate?  In some ways, we have come to the conclusion that nearly everything we have painted for quite some time now has been a collaboration.  While working on these two paintings, we have also been painting other things.  When we stand back, we always ask for each others input. Sometimes the advice we give or get from one another makes the painting.  So in a way, we have been collaborating all along.  But we do have an idea in mind for another painting we'd like to try.

Both of these two paintings started with a plan, a map so to speak. We may have taken a wrong turn here or there, but we had a destination in mind.  When I was very young, maybe 5 years old, mom and I used to go on adventures.  Our mother/daughter days would involve
climbing into the VW Bug with a packed lunch, and taking turns calling out "Left" or "Right" every time we came to an intersection.  We lived in the mountains outside of Hood River, Or., so often we'd end up at a stream, an orchard, or a picturesque waterfall, and there we would have our picnic.  No map was involved.  That's what we want to try next.  We want to start with a blank canvas, no map, and just see where it takes us.  It'll be an adventure.

Growing Pains

Some paintings seem to evolve much like many of us do.  They start off as a beautiful idea,
and begin with an endearing simplicity.  They might make startling leaps forward, only to clumsily fall back on their bottoms, but you brush them off and set them on their feet again.  Soon they move into an awkward phase, an embarrassing phase, a phase during which the camera is no friend and you wonder "What is the point?"  But you push through. You listen to Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel singing words of encouragement, "Don't give up..." And one morning, it gets better.  And not long after that, something clicks and it all seems to come together.

I went back to the studio eager to see what mom had done to "save" our painting. And while she had definitely pulled it through it's darkest hour, it still had a way to go.  It needed simplifying...or something.  It still needed work.

Etiquette. Family politics. Respect. Pride. Humility. Empathy. Humor.
My mother had said she was feeling good about the painting.  In the past, I've never really held back with my opinions of her work.  I'm usually not callous, but I'm often very candid.  It's the reason my mother values my opinion.  I know her work. I am familiar with her process. I know what she is capable of creating and I know that she occasionally will hit a point with a painting where she'll give up and call it good...when it's not.  I try not to let her get away with that.  Honestly, if I said nothing, eventually she would admit it herself, but I try to save her the time.

This is our painting however, and somehow that made it harder, rather than easier, to voice my opinion. I didn't want her to think I didn't like part of the painting simply because it wasn't how I would do it, but rather, because I simply didn't think it worked.  The face was still wrong, better, but not yet right.  Rather than taking back over, I sketched out an idea that took where she had gone just a little further.  Mom liked it, changed the colors, and put the painting back on track. I tidied up the hair and feet, slimmed some lines on the fingers, and we were both happy again.

We were both happy again, yes.  We both liked it. We liked the composition.  We were both pleased with the lines, with the colors, with the flow.  But...

...there was still something...missing.  There was just the slightest bit of..."and then?"

Mom often carries around a notebook into which she copies down quotes that she likes.  Things she reads, or hears someone say.  It's good, writing it down, because my mom deals with both dyslexia and attention deficit disorder, so even if she focused long enough to memorize something someone said, something could potentially get lost while recalling the quote in order to offer someone her advice. My mother also has a lot of advice to offer.  Actually this is an unfortunate family trait.  We all suffer from Advice Tourette's. Should you ever relay some quandary you might be in to my mother, me, or any of my siblings, we will undoubtedly offer you our unsolicited advice.  We all have our own advice styles, compassionate, enthusiastic, mystic, mad as hell, fatherly, teacherly, preacherly, we mix it up sometimes to keep it fresh...but I stray, back to the point...

...now the painting was saying something.  Mostly it was quoting Seneca. Then just a touch...

...and a couple of brushes...

...and this is my mother.

Everything She Can Do, I Can Do Better...

...She Can Do Everything Better Than Me.

(I know, those aren't the actual words to that song, I had to adjust them to fit our process.)

I was really liking the almost graphic novel feel of the painting I had started.  It had a sort of edge to the lines. Apparently, mom, never having done a self portrait before, forgot that we weren't exactly doing portraits.  She thought some of the lines I'd created made her look mean and skeletal.  So she took this...

...and turned it into this.

OK, not bad, if the goal were to paint portraits of our 20 years younger Disney selves.
Too harsh?  But look what she did to my precious lines! This was not heading in the direction either of us had originally intended, but mom was pretty pleased with it at this point. So what to do?

Well, there were a couple of options; A. Disregard our original plan and just go with this, completing the painting as a portrait of how we always feel younger than our years, or
B. As mom is fond of saying to me, "Just let go of it, you can always paint it again."
I love it when she says that.  It's like telling someone who gets laid off a week before retirement, "You can always start a new career."  OK, it's not quite like that, but it feels like that sometimes.

The decision to let go of it and try to move it back into the original direction was difficult because mom was as attached to this as I was to my "mean, skeletal" lines.  So I took the painting back and proceeded to...ugh...

...really screw it up.  What's the term my uncle used to use? FUBAR?

Well, if we were not doing this collaborative project, I may have been tempted at this point to just chuck it, Gesso over the whole thing and start over.  However, as this was exactly the kind of thing this project involves, I instead carried that canvas back to mom and asked her if she could  "Please do something."

Meanwhile, I'd been changing a few things on the painting she had started.  The main obstacle there was that while it was one thing to hand my painting over to her, it was quite another thing to take her painting over myself.  I was afraid of messing something up, or not being able to add anything useful.  Actually, I did find some colors that wanted changing, some shadows that were needed, and a way to include flowers, which were an integral part of the story the painting is telling.  We were both pretty happy with it in the end.

(I like that in this second photo you can see mom struggling with the mess I'd created.)

Later that night, I got a call from mom, saying that she'd saved the painting.

I couldn't wait to get over there to see what she had done.