Working with other artists has its way of enhancing and altering the way I look at things.  It allows me a brief glimpse through someone else’s eyes.  I spent sometime in the studio this weekend with Sol Davis working on collaborative projects for our show in June 2011.  I got to see the preliminary sketch he has started for our promo image (on right).  It blew me away.  We had discussed the imagery of a woman with a bird-cage as part of her, but he took it in a new and exciting direction that I was not expecting.  He chose to depict her body as a bird-cage instead of the skirt and his choice to incorporate the eggs were new to me.  This is what I really enjoy about the collaborative process.  Seeing someone take an idea that I have been turning around in my head and create something even more amazing.  It is so inspiring.

We were in the studio until the early hours of the morning working on our pieces.  Sol is a two-dimensional artist, he works primarily on wood, burning his lines into the surface and washing bring colors onto his images.  This was his first experience with clay.  I had made seven clay boxes for him to carve.  They shape of the boxes are very similar to the wood he usually works with.  It took him about 20 minuets of playing with the tools but he quickly figured it out.   As he carved his images into the box, I worked on a sculpture that is inspired by the figures from his paintings.