Making Art Together

creating in community

What happens when you get sixteen artists from various disciplines together to create one piece of art? You’d think we’d make a mess, and I guess we kind of did at first. We taped four big pieces of white paper together and followed directions, adding to it in stages. Only a few of us knew the final destination, which was part of the fun. When you don’t know what you’re doing, and someone tells you all you have to do is put marks on paper, you are pretty uninhibited.

We started with pens and colored pencils, then added big brush strokes of colorful paints, then used some kind of scrapey tool with different paint to make interesting patterns, then squirted sprays of water and drip-dropped alcohol paint that spread when it hit the water like it was some kind of microorganism. Each person contributed their own bold, swishy, splotchy, creative marks on our long canvas. We got our hands dirty together. And then what?

We were given a 2X2 mat and instructed to frame any part of the painting that we wanted, capturing unique patterns and splooshes of color, outlining it with Sharpie. Then we cut out the tiles, and arranged them in a colorful paper quilt.

We arranged and rearranged those tiles until we found new themes and patterns, ways that the colors played off each other. When we had it just right, we took a picture so we could remember how it turned out.

Then each person took their tile home. Mine looks kind of like two pickles in a purple rainstorm.

It’s sitting next to my desk, where each time I look at it I’ll be reminded not to worry too much about where I’m headed. Attend to the task at hand. I don’t have to be afraid that I didn’t get it right. Creating in community meant not getting wrapped up in what I thought it should look like. And what came out of it was better than I could have imagined and executed on my own.

Working in community doesn’t have to mean collaborating on one piece of work. My friend and incredibly talented potter, Camille Sales, recently started doing a pretty cool thing with her husband and two grown kids, which she’s posting to Instagram. They pick a painting and do an art study, each one of them interpreting what they see with their own style. No one is right, or wrong. They’re all different, all beautiful.

I wonder, would the four of them have painted these pictures on their own? It takes intention to create together, and maybe intention is just what we need to give us a push in a new direction, or get us farther along in the same direction. On Mondays I zoom with three other writers. We sit in our boxes, framed in 2X4ish squares, creating side by side. Just being in the presence of others, however it looks, can be generative. May you find your people, and create beautiful things together.

P.S.

In her excellent book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, Anne Lamott talks about a one inch picture frame she keeps on her desk.

The small frame reminds her that all she has to do, one day at a time, is write the one scene or portrait that she can imagine through that one inch picture frame. Not a whole chapter or essay or book, just one piece. The small paper tile on my desk also reminds me to relax and write what I can write that day. It is a small piece of a much larger work, and I don’t have to know exactly where I’m headed. All I have to do is take my frame, find something interesting in my mess of thoughts, and tell that story.

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My name is Meredith Davis, and I’m an award winning writer of middle grade books, a former indie bookseller, founder of the Austin chapter of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts with an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults. Find teaching resources and author visit information on my website at www.meredithldavis.com. Mother to three, Nana to one and counting TWO, I live with my husband and a crazy doodle in Austin, Texas.