Douglas Witmer
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Friday, February 10, 2006
drawing with paige williams
I met the Cincinnati-based artist Paige Williams in 2000 when we were both in residence at the Vermont Studio Center. No surprise we hit it off. At the time she was working with flasche on small birch panels. The shapes were sort of biomorphic. The surfaces were absolutely flat and matte, in the most fragile way. I have a small painting from this time and I hesitate even to breathe on it. I love it.
Paige teaches at The Art Academy of Cincinnati, and I suspect that she sets a great example for her students with the constancy and inquisitiveness of her drawing. Paige is someone who I think truly lives with drawing as a daily visual response to her life and I have always admired that.
In the fall of 2000, we started to make drawings collaboratively using paper from tablets called "Le Maxi" that were available at the Vermont Studio Center's art supply store. We would mail them back and forth. We had an exhibition lined up in August 2001 and we were intending to show 1000 drawings. For a variety of reasons, this exhibition sadly fell through. Our first phase of collaboration ended around this time. Unpacking in my studio recently, I found the box with the drawings I have. We have started working on some again.
In general we would each begin a set by sending the other 50-100 drawings, many of which were playful variants of the other, drawn quickly and in series. Then we would send these away and it became the other person's role to decide which ones they wanted to work on and what they wanted to do. There are currently several hundred drawings in progress, of which there are about 100 we both consider finished.
Click here for a gallery of 32 images of our drawings. These were all 2-step drawings, meaning that one of us did something, the next did something, and we decided it was done. There are some drawings that have gone back and forth several times. I include beneath the drawings our names in the order of who started and finished the drawing.
Click here to see examples of Paige's work from her recent exhibition in Cincinnati.
Click here (and then scroll down) to see installation views of her exhibition.
10.2.06 
1 Comments:
Whoa, comments. Living dangerously!
I would be interested in knowing how this practice then and now is the same or different, and how this collabortive work influenced or was incorporated into the solo work you each did during and after.
Hopefully you'll have another chance to show this stuff.
By 
, at
2/10/2006