Cooperation and collaboration are words that reflect the coming together of people to accomplish a common goal. The words achieve a special resonance when the goal is creating a work of art. We came together to do a painting commemorating the 400th anniversary of the exploration of the Hudson River. The result of that cooperation/collaboration was the completion of a 10’ x 6’ painting on canvas-and more! It was an exhilarating bonding of people, each of whom normally work in different mediums and styles, in a joyful experience based on mutual respect and admiration.
Elayne Seaman
Jazz painting
As I drove to Cindy Dill's studio where Long Reach Arts was to begin its first ever collaborative project I felt both excitement and trepidation. The thought of creating a 6' x 9 1/2' painting was thrilling, but the fact that there was no design for it, no image we had all agreed on, much less a preliminary cartoon on the canvas, was a bit daunting. When I arrived at Cindy's, the group, under Trina Greene's guidance, was just beginning to pour paint on to the canvas, activating its surface. With that exhilarating sight, trepidation disappeared and excitement took over as we all reached for our brushes and began to apply colors to the small shapes enclosed by the lines of poured paint. During the weeks of working on this piece the excitement never left me. I felt as if I was playing jazz, each of us improvising off what someone else was doing. At times I felt frustrated by the lack of structure in the piece and feared that if structure wasn't introduced soon the painting would collapse into nothing more than a chaos of disparate beautiful parts unconnected by an over arcing composition. I had to trust that we would pull it all together which, in the end, I think we did.
Carol Pepper Cooper