An Honest Critique Of Our Work...

Hello Friends,As we mentioned in a recent  letter  we have been a little quiet here on the blog. In addition to taking some time to focus on our individual art practices, we have spent the past few months  re-reading this blog from the beginning.   Good grief, there is a lot here!Reading the tentative beginnings of getting to know one another through a weekly mail art project reflects the birth of our current long-term friendship.  It demonstrates our admiration and respect for one another's creative process.   Once we left graduate school it was no longer sustainable as we had more demands on our time. Switching to a monthly exchange through the mail, we created a  collaborative book .  This took us two years to complete and still remains one of our favorite projects.  It was like getting present every time it arrived in our mailbox.   More on that in a minute...We tried our hand creating on the same piece of art  for our TAOS Project, (Two Artists One Surface). This was sent back and forth through the mail as well.  This one didn't work out as well as we had hoped.  We got too stuck on negotiating one another's very different color palettes.Next, we constructed an installation in Charleston  (and later an exhibition in Connecticut- insert link) where we invited feedback about beauty.  Watch our VIDEO about this process and subsequent work we created.  This was a great experience, but being in two different states makes these collaborations more one-sided (the experience being more real for the person who had the work in her town).Our Vision/ReVision Project is our longest project. To date we each have created 120 pieces of art each, totaling 240.  This call-and-response approach has been our most successful.  We appreciate the prompt of inspiration from each other that invites us to see the world and our art practices differently.So, here we go...this is our self-evaluation of working the past ten years together.

1. We don't like working on the same surface together, but we do like bouncing ideas off one another.
2. We don't like seeing our work only on the computer screen, but we do like spreading it all out in a large room and having super long conversations about collaboration.
3. We don't like being told what to create, but we do like hearing about what inspires one another and experiments being discovered in our studios (and teaching one another).
4. We like looking at artwork together and discussing HUGE ideas about being an artist and how to share what we know, however we don't always like getting bogged down on all the minutia of blog life (as a result you may find us writing less on the blog and creating art more).

Where to go from here?

Digging into our teacher backgrounds, we are culminating and consolidating the best of what we do.We have purchased a box.  This box will be mailed back and forth between the two of us. In this box will be placed works of art on paper of various sizes.  That is it.Now imagine this box after a year...two years....three years.  It will be stuffed with art! Our favorite part is that this art we can taken out in mass, spread all over the room and furniture and reflected on as a continuously building body of work rather than one simple piece of art (like our Vision/ReVision).We are not sure where this project with lead us but it feeds into our belief that if one trusts the creative process with patience, good work will follow.We hope to have a tall stack of art by the end of 2016.  Let the fun begin!p.s.- If anyone has a suggestion for a title for this work, please let us know!