Recent Exhibition

mixed media on paper

24x18

"M P and I began collaborating on paintings in the streets of SOHO sometime in 2000, where we would set up displays of our own paintings and drawings. While there was certainly the thought to sell the resulting collaborations, it became clear pretty quickly that the process was going to take over all else…we couldn’t stop once we started.

We would spend hours at a time going back and forth, setting up boards with several paintings on each at a time, swapping boards once one of us felt our “turn” was done. If there were any rules at all to it all, the only agreed-upon constant was that a painting could only be called done after each person had had a crack at it and that once you did anything to a piece you could not call it finished. After that point, it was anybody’s call.

This period of painting has had long-lasting impacts on me as an artist and as a person. Handing your creation over to someone else to edit, cover-up, add-to, spit on, whatever, can really teach you a lot about not being precious with what you create. It also teaches you at least as much about how much you know and trust the other person as you would learn from speaking with them. You never know what the painting will look like next time you see it, but you know that you'll most likely laugh, gasp in surprise or change your mind about something you thought you knew. To this day, I treat my own paintings as collaborations with myself. Each day I enter my studio I approach it as if the painting has been handed over to me by a previous version of myself. I was in a different mood yesterday; I had different experiences that day…

Our street collaborations naturally led us to work together in M P’s studio, through the mail and during live painting sessions in conjunction with live music at several JUMP Festival events. Each venue produced different results. Working live to music without stopping was a workout to be sure, and produced work that had the intensity and immediacy of free form jazz. Our sessions in his studio were similar in intensity, but without the audience (and therefore the self-awareness that inevitably creeps in when “performing” in front of other people, for better or worse). Just as enjoyable was the act of opening up a new package of fresh work in my studio that M P had sent me to work on. These are the works that perhaps were the quirkiest and most diverse. I would often set the works off to the side and work on them in between working on my own paintings. They served as a welcome diversion and at the same time, sounding board for new ideas or expansion of ideas I was already working on.

In the full body of work M P and I have produced over the years one can see an ongoing dialogue between two great friends, full of whimsy, emotion and searching."

- Les Seifer