The opening for the "Dueling Minds" show this past Friday, Feb. 24th was a success! We had a large and diverse crowd, coming in waves throughout the course of the entire evening and engaging us with great questions about the work. Dale & I sold eight paintings, including one of our pairs of the same title, which made us feel vindicated in our endeavor. As stated in our press release, we decided upon the unique approach of assembling a list of titles before any work began, assigning each title to a predetermined size, then went off on our own to create our own rendering of that title separately, free of any influence of the other’s work. What surprised and baffled Dale, myself, and the crowd was how much the work had in common when placed side by side...
Exhibit A:
24 x 24" each
No, we did not see what the other was doing color-wise or other as these canvases were worked on. We simply bought the same sized canvases, agreed upon a title during one of our discussions, and went back to our studio's to work. That the colors are so similar was surprising enough, but then for whatever reason Dale put two circles in his top right canvas. While I did not use orange in my tic-tac-toe paintings, I did use a very orangey copper paint. Yes my design possessed a a more rigid structuring than Dale's pair, but they were all four rendered in a very painterly fashion. We had not seen, nor had we discussed what the other was doing on these canvases, and yet they ended up being alarmingly similar in more than one way. Uncanny!
Exhibit B:
"The Depths"
20 x 24" each
Even with my terrible photo, it's easy to see the upward, unfurling movement in these canvases, not to mention the similarity in colors, including the highlight/foreground use of red paint. And though I'm pretty sure Dale wasn't trying to paint a seahorse in his canvas (bottom), but combined with my "bubbly" painting above, there was a sort of quasi-aquatic thing going on here that's undeniable in my eyes. Weird!
Exhibit C:
"Hot and Cold"
20 x 24" each
Again, the use of red as highlight/foreground color on both of these make them similar, but the silver paint and scratchy, violent nature these two canvases share really drive it home. And though my substandard photo doesn't show it well, my canvas (top) has blueish underpainting revealed where I scratches vertical lines through the silver background. Not unalike!
Exhibit D:
20 x 24" each
While this unexplainable, chance "mirroring" of one another goes on throught most all of the show, I offer one of the more enigmatic pairings. There are many ways the two canvases pictured above differ: Dale's canvas (bottom) has a very surface-oriented, topical nature that crosshatches in all directions, whereas my washed in, vertical "sprouts" are deeply imbedded into the red ground color. For no reason Dale could offer, his last touch at the bottom of his canvas was a horizontal line of colors that mirror my canvas above! Why??
And you'd just have to see the rest of them to believe it- nearly every pair baffled both our audience and ourselves with their similarities. Like something out of the Twilight Zone, this is by far the strangest thing I've ever witnessed or participated in. I've never seen a ghost or UFO, I'm not particularly religious or superstitious, and while the hair wasn't standing on the back of my neck, I'm unsure I'll ever be able to explain what happened here. It was just... surreal. There will be a closing reception on March 30th you won't want to miss if you couldn't make it to the opening- details to come :)
