Art is funny like that...

This morning as we painted with acrylics, I watched Tracy lather the colors onto her board, blending rich blue with a green, moving the brush around as though she were really a part of the colors themselves; meanwhile, I stood over my board and tried in my most meticulous method to recreate an image of the delicate little egg that her chicken lay, an egg she presented to me as a present.  It ended up looking more like a fig than an egg, and the other end of my board has beautiful knots that I wanted to use as part of my schema, but how?

As we worked side by side, Tracy muttering about not giving up and both of us intensely invested in our painting and not our weightless conversation that floated in and out of the space, I watched her piece become artistic while mine because Kindergarten.  She cooed and urged me on, saying, "You really DO have a style."  I thought to myself, "Yea, some style to have like a 6 year old's!"  The magic of working together, though, is that her movements and her process inspire me to move beyond the familiarly domestic, but then I realize that if I cannot do something as fundamental as an egg and a cup, I have no business exploring the abstract and the ephemeral.

I like these two pieces together because we began with different colors, moved in completely different directions and then ended our session in strangely disparate states of completion.  Mine feels incomplete, and I think she overworked hers with white so that she lost some of the very richness with which she began. I like that about both pieces because when we come back to them, I will have to pick up presumably where I left off, moving where I think I am going, and Tracy will have to go somewhere new because she cannot go back; in other words, she is building something magical, and I am plodding towards the familiar.

Maybe I shall throw coffee grounds on it next week and see just where that takes me~ !