Two artists arting face to face
How a tossed off comment led to an amazing creative exchange
Live and in person!
It started as a simple reply to an IG story post by Douglas Witmer, an artist friend of mine here in Philly I’ve known going back to 2000, probably even earlier. Anyway, the post was about some hand-made artist drawing books that Douglas had made and was offering for sale a couple of weeks ago. I really liked the look and simplicity of the books and responded, “Such a great idea, I may have to steal it!”. He wrote back saying, “Yo like next week or week after we should meet up and I’ll show you how I make them. We can make a book for each other.”
It didn’t quite register at first because while I’m used to doing studio visits with fellow artists, there’s never any component of actually working on anything, unless there’s a planned collaboration. Usually, we’ll catch up on what we’ve been working on, how things are going with shows, family, etc… This was different, but I wholeheartedly welcomed Douglas’s generosity in wanting to show me how to make the books.
Once I got there and we settled in, Douglas showed me how to make the covers and inside pages, all folded in half after using a paper cutter to get the sizes I wanted. What Douglas had and I didn’t was a long-reach stapler to hold the cover and inside pages together. Outside of that, it’s really holds barred in terms of how you might want to make your own. Another bit of advice is to use paper that’s under 140lbs so you don’t have a hard time with the staples, which are regular office staples, nothing fancy.
Both Douglas and I kept our books simple, as far as pages go. I used three full sheets of paper that yielded six workable pages and I used front and back. I didn’t know what I was going to do, so I brought a bunch of colored Posca acrylic markers with me and wound up using only the grey-scale Tombow markers only.
We just sat there for almost three hours just talking, joking and making art and listening to music, that’s it. One of the best ways to spend part of an afternoon with a friend. The only times our phones were used was for taking photos and I forgot to take any shots of Douglas and barely remembered to document the book I made for him. I could’ve just kept going and not taken ANY photos, even to document the piece I made. That’s what being in person with friends and leaving the phone out of the equation will do. The time will fly by, new memories are made, you get fresh perspectives on things and maybe some new neurons formed from learning new information.
AND you can get energized! Which is what I told Douglas later after I’d left his place. I do well being a very solitary person and can go long times without the company of others, but being in the company of people I like makes a hell of a difference. This went so well, we've vowed to do it again, maybe in a couple of months at my studio.
Moral of the story: Get with your people in person when you can and fill yourselves up with good energy away from the internet.
Above: a short video of the book Douglas made for me during our session.
Guest room gallery
It’s that time of year again, where we usually host family for Christmas and don’t have much space to actually have someone stay over this year, except my girlfriend’s mom, who got first choice of the available spare bedroom/laundry/cat litter box room and storage space.
Don’t worry, we made other accommodations for the litter boxes and cleaned up everything more than usual to make it comfortable.
In the meantime, I realized that there was a lot of wall space once we moved some stored items out of there. I thought it would be great to hang some older works up that had been in another room in the house where no one would see them. These are all paintings and one etching that I made circa 2003-2010. Julia’s mom was very happy to have the work up and being an artist herself, had plenty to say about each one. All positive, thankfully. There’s nothing worse than having someone sleeping in a room and they don’t like the artwork. Her favorite one seems to be “Pour”, the painting with the green/aqua stripes in the background with yellow, orange and burgundy on top.
It’s nice seeing this work all up and not wrapped up tucked away in a corner.
New work
This may very well be the final painting of this year for me, but of course, I have three other ones in progress and there’s still a week and-a-half left before January, so you never know what may happen. Even though I’ve been focusing a little more on the interwoven triangular forms in my work, like that of the “Black Drawing” paintings, I’m clearly not done with the glyphs, yet, and may never be.
Again, here I’m still exploring ideas about the “spaces between”: between one place, sound, word, moment and another.
Last, but not least, I saw a black squirrel in the wild! Well, as wild as the University of Pennsylvania’s campus can get. I’d just come from a meeting and was headed across the city to my studio when I saw this little one. Magnificent.
Last call…maybe…
I may yet have another studio blog post in me for 2024, but we’ll see. It’s been a crazy hell of a year and I’m sure things are going to get even wilder in January with the new federal administration. In the meantime, I’m going to keep going like I have, enjoying what I can in life and leaving what doesn’t work in the dust.
In case this IS my final post of the year, I want to sincerely thank everyone who has taken the time to read, comment, like and otherwise support what I’m doing here and in the studio. I truly appreciate you lending me your time and attention.
Happy whatever-you-celebrate for the holidays and my very best wishes for a Happy, healthy, good energy, less stress and love-filled New Year!
What a beautiful session! And your book made me think of the artist Irma Blank, who handmade more than a 100 books and with whom I had the enormous pleasure of working. I hope you don’t mind me leaving a very short episode I did about our collaboration. If you watch the video version there is an image of one of her books https://open.spotify.com/episode/7IhTwvBf9XLDFUS7r0L6PS?si=EqtjmN9bSDio02LAkb-vhQ
This is great. I have been toying with getting into handmade books recently. This post is priming me. Great added component to share with friends in collaboration. Thx