As I felt the original Corona Lectures winding down after a year, I developed the sense that I wanted the next phase to be something more collaborative. I was already using quotations from writers I admired and, most of the time, asking friends to record these quotes for the videos, so it’s not as if the original lectures were wholly solitary affairs. Foregrounding this aspect—inherent from conception—felt like one of the natural evolutions the project could take. I had not done much if any collaboration in my creative life, and a move in that direction held out the promise of a new and enjoyable category of creative activity.

That James Holmberg came to me with the idea of a collaboration—at the moment he did—was simply good fortune. And what good fortune! This period of working with Holmberg on his Absence series of canvases has been one of the peak creative experiences of my life. My intuition about the pleasure of working on a collaborative project was far too modest. This project has fully engaged me, made demands I was not confident I could meet, offered obstacles and frustrations that kept me challenged, and led to a series of videos I couldn’t have imagined when I accepted his offer. It has whetted my appetite for more collaborative work, which I will discuss in future posts.

Holmberg came to me with much of his part of the collaboration already decided—creating many paintings on few canvases, scraping and washing off the paintings when they were done rather than preserving them for display, using time lapse photography to capture the process of creation and destruction and serve as a digital asset. I asked him to record his thoughts in the midst of his painting as another source of raw material for my videos. He provided me with the files as they became available, and I set off to work.

The results are six videos, five that are each based on the material from a different canvas and another silent video that emerged out of an intense period of frustration that followed the completion of the first video. Here are links to each of the videos:

Your Heart Is the Canvas (5:00)

Disparate Images and an Experience of Alternate Paintings (8:48)

Need Makes a Compromise (7:33)

All Is Not Lost (9:33)

The Stain That’s Left Behind (13:00)

Nothing Is Worth Your Attention (silent - 6:53)

While the essential elements of the creative work—the videos and the canvases—for this collaboration have been completed, it is my hope that we have not yet seen it in full flower. There was talk of a presentation or a panel discussion, which I hope we will one day have the opportunity to do. I would also like to see a show in which the videos are more fully integrated into the experience of the viewer at the gallery. There are also many opportunities available digitally. I hope and believe that we have only completed the first phase of this collaboration, but only time will tell. Even if this is the end, it has been one of the great artistic experiences of my life.

I will close by thanking James Holmberg for trusting me in this collaboration. Alongside the pleasure of working with the material and making the videos, there have been countless conversations that have kept the creative fire alight. Sometimes I wonder if it was those conversations I was looking for when I first thought to work in collaboration.