Collaborations between artists can take many forms. Taking turns and painting on the same canvass, without knowing where it is going, involves a lack of ego and a high level of trust.
When Susan Tobey White, an artist friend and gallery owner from Belfast, Maine, suggested that she and I try this approach, we had no idea whether it would work for us. But, sharing an open nature, a love of similar colors and subjects, it resulted in work we could not have produced alone. Here is what came from this adventure in taking chances.
Chances pay off at Friday Night Art Walks
VillageSoup/Waldo County Citizen Reporter
BELFAST (Aug 8): Friday Night Art Walks switched from a monthly to a weekly schedule in July and has been going strong through the summer. Every Friday night features different street performers and gallery openings. The column below is a snapshot from one of these mid-summer evenings.
If the Friday Night Art Walk had a message Aug. 1, it might have been something about taking a chance.
The weather was iffy, with fog over the bay and a light mist falling. Inside High Street Gallery, Jeanne Dawson and Susan Tobey White were taking turns painting on a canvas that was turned toward the gallery door for all to see. Aarhus Gallery was showing an exceptionally large painting by Doug Bell. And on the corner of Main and High streets, Morty Hansen was juggling to beat the band, except when he was making mistakes.
Morty Hansen with four pins aloft. (Photo by Ethan Andrews)
Hansen was mostly alone on the corner, though there were times when a crowd of four or five gathered to watch him throw assorted projectiles, always working somewhere above the three-ball threshold that identifies beginners. Hansen could be mistaken for a kid but he’s been juggling and performing for more than 15 years and has managed to make it his livelihood.
“I can’t say that anyone was supportive of me doing this,” he said.
Hansen is the kind of juggler who can go through an entire solo show without missing a trick, and for a while he did just that. But the shows started to feel “safe,” and he thought that might be boring for people. So he decided to up the ante.
In a show with a couple thousand throws, he figured, some pins are bound to hit the ground, and it would be worth it for the harder tricks. “There’s humor,” he said, “in part because mistakes are going to happen.”
A small-scale version of Koko Experience, from Augusta, led
by Kwabena Owusu, far left. (Photo by Ethan Andrews)
Across the street, a five-piece drum ensemble called Koko Experience had upped its own ante from earlier in the evening, adding two singers for a rendition of Babatunde Olatunji’s “Akiwowo.” The band wore matching Day-Glo green and yellow T-shirts like kids on a school field trip. A row of congas ranged in front of the group, two of them gorgeously hand-carved pieces.
Several lone dancers had turned into a crowd of 15 or so onlookers as the band thundered through one 10-minute arrangement after another.
Kwabena Owusu started the group several years ago, mostly by word of mouth, elevating it from a drum circle to a working band that can pass with as few as two or three members or fill out to a 14-piece dance band with trap kit, electric bass, horns and singers.
Most of the polyrhythmic beats, Owusu said, are from his native Ghana, neighboring Mali and Nigeria. Under some pressure, he agreed to say that the full band sounds a bit like Fela Kuti. Judy Boucher, who was playing a calabash shaker, called the sound of Koko Experience “African Salsa.”
Boucher said Koko Experience recently played for the NAACP, at “some grade schools” and at Skowhegan for a benefit to repair the town's well-known, 62-foot-tall statue of an Indian.
Inside High Street Gallery, the mood was all wine-and-cheese gallery opening, except the artists weren’t mingling. They were busy working on a new painting.
Jeanne Dawson roughs in a flower arrangement, starting an
evening of co-painting at High Street Gallery. (Photo by
Ethan Andrews)
Susan Tobey White, who owns High Street Gallery and displays her paintings of dancers year round, had started the painting the evening before. Using broad strokes, she blocked in several patches of purple so at least one layer would be dry before they started in.
White said people often mistake Jeanne Dawson’s work for hers, and the semblance is nearly complete. Both use a similar, optimistic palette of saturated midvalues painted in a style that’s loose but not sloppy. There’s nothing so bright as a box of laundry detergent, nor many earth tones on the other end, and the subject matter is generally reassuring.
Susan Tobey White picks up where Dawson left off. (Photo by
Ethan Andrews)
Another two artists working in the same way might battle back and forth, arriving at a treaty by evening’s end. Dawson and White, however, seemed to be working on the same page of the same book. The two painters have done six paintings in this way. At first, White said, they would just respond to what the other had done on the canvas. Now, she said, they get into each other’s heads.
Most of the east wall of Aarhus Gallery was taken up by a matrix of card-table-sized panels, collaged with doors, lids from cans of house paint and a cascading fan of Massachusetts license plates. It was a kind of rural Rauschenberg on a grand scale, and it had the effect of keeping most of the visitors to the gallery tracking along the opposite wall.
At the front desk, Richard Mann was trying to cajole Ando Anderson into buying the painting, which had the grand title "Belfast Galaxy." “If they were Maine license plates, I might do it,” Anderson said.
Karin Spitfire and Linda Buckmaster must have drawn the short straw for stage locations. The two poets ended up on an otherwise vacant stretch of Main Street in front of Dudley’s Diner. “Poems! Poems! I’m reading poems over here!” Buckmaster hollered across the street, toward a stream of pedestrians in front of Aarhus. “No risk, no charge!”
Jill, Tim and Graham Lucas, take in a poem by Linda
Buckmaster. (Photo by Ethan Andrews)
“I’m having a blast,” she said.
Some people had shuffled by her saying “no, no, no” but many more had stopped to listen to her read from a chapbook of her own poems. A teenager, she said, had been listening to one of her poems when the cell phone chimed. “Hey, I can’t talk,” the teen said, “I’m listening to a poem.”
Above the Post Office, Dina Petrillo was trying to close up but several friends arrived and then a few more. She’d been fishing recently and was explaining her good fortune to Bennett Verbeck who had just arrived by boat.
“What where you using?’ he asked.
“Lures,” she said.
What kind of lures, he asked. The important part to a fisherman he explained was these very details.
She said she remembered it as being orange.
Petrillo has worked in many media but the studio, this evening, was dominated by collographs — low relief prints made by inking a textured surface and running it through a printing press. The paper gets somewhat embossed, and the bumps and ridges of the printing block hold the ink unpredictably making for lush, organic images invested with a certain amount of serendipity.
Caleb Crawford, an architecture professor visiting from Mississippi, told Petrillo he was working electronically with a tablet and stylus. Crawford, who is tall and lank with close-cropped hair, was dressed as though he lived in a big city, which he did until recently. The electronic drawing process, he said, had some of the same qualities as drawing with a pencil.
Petrillo said she’d stopped using the computer because the laser-printed images seemed too flat. But the great thing about drawing on the computer, she offered, would be that you could distort the image.
Out on the street, the pavement was wet but the rain had stopped. It was dark and quiet. The performers had all packed up and most of the storefronts were dark. At High Street Gallery, White and Dawson had finished their work, a wonderfully carefree painting that had somehow outdone the ebullient bouquet that had inspired it.
Jeanne Dawson and Susan Tobey White's co-authored
painting at the end of the evening. (Photo by Ethan Andrews)
If the painting was difficult to make, it wasn’t because they'd had an audience. White’s studio adjoins the gallery with no doors separating it from the main space. It’s always open for anyone to wander in.
“For me, that’s what it’s about,” she said, “making art accessible to everyone.”
Friday Night Art Walks got a boost this year from the Maine Community Foundation which awarded the Belfast Arts Council two grants totaling $7,140 to hire street performers and cover other expenses related to the weekly events..Jeanne
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