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.