Collaborative Painting with Azin Seraj
This watercolor and gouache painting was made by my good friend, Azin Seraj and myself. It is 3 feet by 4 feet (92cm x 123cm), painted on paper. I think this painting is a pleasure to stare at.
Weaving, Sol Lewitt and zen painting were influences for us.
Azin says this about our painting, "Our rule-based process for this painting went like this:
Matt and I would both mix the darkest black color that we could, but using different pigments to make these blacks. Matt made a cool black, I made a warm black. We would try to get our colors to match as closely as possible, while knowing that there would be slight differences.
I would start on one side of the painting and Matt would start at the other, and we would both paint every other rectangle. When we met in the middle, we would fill in the blank spaces left by the other person. This would create a woven texture and create a metaphor for collaboration because it would take both of us working together to create each “woven line.” We see the final painting as a “tapestry” made from two types of “thread”.
We would use up all of our paint in each session to create the near impossible challenge of recreating the same black color the next time we painted. So with each painting session, the color would slightly shift, creating layers that looked a lot like geologic strata layers, the same kind of layers you would see if you cut a cross section out of a mountain."
