How Does Your Garden grow?

Several times I have made the experiment of painting a collaborative image with a partner. The rules are simple: (a) you don’t make a plan together, (b) you paint one at a time, in short bursts, (c) you agree not to blot out anything you have done or your friend has done, (d) you engage with what is there, instead of going off to separate corners of the paper, (e) you keep going until the paper is full, maybe ten turns each, (f) you never say afterwards, “I did that,” pointing to a certain feature, always presenting the completed image as a collaboration.

What is engagement? You may decorate something, add on, make a bold gesture, tease, introduce a new motif, change what is there into something else, and so forth.

I once helped make a collaborative painting on a second date, with someone who painted frequently and had enjoyed a one-person show in San Francisco. I was quite nervous, in spite of having had a brief period of messing around with paints a couple of decades before. The result is above, “How Does Your Garden Grow?”

The point was not to make a great painting, but to see whether we could collaborate to respond to what the other has done in a way that’s fun, a way that builds something. Obviously, paint is not the only medium for such explorations, but it has the advantage of leaving an immediate record.

At the time of our date, there was much burble about the left brain (verbal) versus the right (imagistic). It’s probably telling to converse without words. You can’t really lie or even tell stories. Do you fall naturally into delighting each other?

This brings up the inevitable question: is it appropriate to paint together on the second date?