Painting and writing together
About us
Our Vision
Our Technique
Our Process
We create our acrylic paintings together. Having this common interest strengthens our relationship (2025 will mark 42 years of marriage), as we collaborate, cooperate, and communicate throughout the process. We enjoy seeing a painting through to completion, sharing it with others, feeling part of the broader community of artists, and contributing to the creative vibration of the region.
It’s easy to feel connection to our early ancestors and to the earth, while we apply dabs of paint with wooden sticks, particularly when sitting cross-legged on the ground (which unfortunately happens less as our knees age and become less forgiving). It’s quite a Zen-like activity, especially when combined with the right background music. Sometimes we feel we've tapped into magic, as we create on canvas a reality that has never existed before. This is especially true when creating a piece that sets a quirky spin on natural objects and scenes. Minnesota landscapes inspire us the most. We often describe our painting style as magical realism. We hope our paintings help others, as they’ve helped us, to see the magic that exists all around us in the natural world.
Our Process
Our Technique
Our Process
We begin each painting by sharing ideas for content and, at the same time, ways to render various elements of the composition. One challenging aspect of working together is finding ways to weave our individual styles into a cohesive visual whole. Because of this we decide, before a dot is placed, who will be working on which parts of the painting, whether it be sky, water, vegetation, foreground, background, sections of a mosaicked area, etc. For example, one of us might do the trunks of trees and another the leaves, or we might do both, but we make sure to balance one person’s trees with the other’s.
Sometimes we can work on a painting simultaneously, depending on how large the canvas is or which sections of the painting we’re working on. When this isn’t logistically possible, we take turns. Often, we’ll have more than one painting underway at one time, so it’s easy to alternate who is working where.
We’re both energized when a painting is underway. We pause frequently, leaning the canvas against a wall, viewing it from a distance, discussing what we like as well as what is not working and how we can improve it. We aren’t always of the same mind, and need to work this out together by helping the other see it from our perspective. We’ve invented terms to describe elements of our technique, to try to minimize misunderstandings. Often-times, we spend as much time analyzing as painting, even though our painting is very time-consuming and labor intensive. But in this way, our paintings are very organic.
Our Technique
Our Technique
Our Technique
We usually apply our paint with sticks -- a technique we adopted from the aboriginal artists of Australia – usually on a black painted canvas. We’ve found that dark backgrounds best bring our preferred jewel tones to life – a trick of light and contrast with an effect like stained glass or mosaic. Having a black background also adds to the already invigorating experience of filling empty space with color, as the world we’re creating takes shape from an almost literal void. Experimenting with contrasting and complementary colors, gradations and transitions -- dot by dot, or in other geometric patches of rich hue -- is exciting, sometimes giving rise to effects we hadn’t anticipated.
Our work has evolved over time. We experimented first with dots and later with other shapes as the basic building-block units of our paintings – changing sizes, adding layers, overlapping, forming patterns, altering spaces between dots/shapes and filling them with different components. We’ve also experimented with unexpected perspectives. We especially like to play with light and shadow and enjoy how it adds life, depth, mystery, and mood to the scene.
Our technique and medium allow for re-examination and experimentation, re-doing and re-imagining – all in a single painting. Happily, we mostly manage to come to agreement and a feeling that the outcome is much better than had one of us been working alone, which reinforces continued harmonious collaboration.