Not related: Thanks­giv­ing was nice. The but­ter­nut squash lasagna was deli­cious!

My favorite part of Art Together, by far, is receiv­ing that email from the artist that con­tains our col­lab­o­ra­tion. Every­one has a dif­fer­ent way of han­dling this project, often in ways I didn’t expect. Thereza Rowe, for instance, built an entire series around the lit­tle piece I sent her. Jake Watling, the newest col­lab­o­ra­tion of Art Together, is no exception.

I first fea­tured Jake’s work back when Brown Paper Bag was in its infancy. Here’s what I sent Jake, about 5″ x 7″ to eas­ily mail:

First, a lit­tle bit of an ice­breaker. Where are you from, and how would your friends describe you?

I was born in Min­nesota but grew up in Florida until I was 12. My fam­ily and I moved from Florida to Toledo, Ohio for a year before mov­ing back to Min­nesota where I lived until I was 24.
I’m not sure how my friends would describe me. My wife and I were just dis­cussing this topic recently. We though it would inter­est­ing to hear oth­ers describe you since most of us have a dis­torted view of ourselves.

Here’s what Jake sent me:

Stack ‘em High, 2010, mixed media col­lage, 19″ x 27″

My part of the col­lab­o­ra­tion was fairly abstract, and you jux­ta­posed that by cre­at­ing a piece that is much more nar­ra­tive, although still styl­ized. What helped to shape this deci­sion?

As soon as I opened the enve­lope and saw the piece that you made I saw it as a pro­file view of a head with hair. I kept turn­ing it dif­fer­ent ways and look­ing at it from dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives but that didn’t change my ini­tial per­cep­tion of the piece being an abstracted head.

What helped deter­mine your use of mate­ri­als and the size of the final piece? Do you do a lot of sketch­ing before­hand?

Since you had given me the ini­tial piece to start off the art­work and it was a mixed media piece already that helped to steer me in the direc­tion of con­tin­u­ing in a collage/mixed media direc­tion. I knew after see­ing it I would use the piece you had made as a head on some type of char­ac­ter. I had done the cut-outs that I used in this piece for an instal­la­tion ear­lier this year and had wanted to use them in some­thing else. This felt like the per­fect oppor­tu­nity to use them again and the piece you had made fit almost seam­lessly onto the old man char­ac­ter. I wanted to have the snake, old man, and chicken staked on top of each other like a walk­ing totem.
In your orig­i­nal piece you had some of the shapes divided in half so I wanted to incor­po­rate that ele­ment into my piece so I divided the back­ground in half to reflect your piece, but also to ref­er­ence a painted build­ing to make it feel like the stack of char­ac­ters are mov­ing down a side­walk somewhere.

For this piece I didn’t do any sketch­ing before I started. What I do a lot of times is start with one part of a draw­ing and see where that takes me next. Lately I’ve been cut­ting out draw­ings that I pro­duce on paper and mount­ing them onto another draw­ing or paint­ing. By lay­er­ing the dif­fer­ent ele­ments it allows be to be able to move the ele­ments around while work­ing until I find the place­ment I like best.

When look­ing at your port­fo­lio, this image is not totally removed from it, despite the fact there were two minds. Where does your inspi­ra­tion for your char­ac­ters and style come from?

The inspi­ra­tion for my char­ac­ters usu­ally comes from peo­ple I see through­out my day.
I uti­lizes a graphic style with a bright color palette that is formed by sim­pli­fy­ing the given imagery and extract­ing col­ors used within the urban environment.

How do you view the char­ac­ter that has my piece as his face/hair? What’s his story?

The elderly man char­ac­ter is more of a sym­bol than a spe­cific per­son. He can rep­re­sent what­ever the viewer feels he rep­re­sents to them. For me he mainly sym­bol­izes time.

Did you have any expec­ta­tions for this col­lab­o­ra­tion, and if so, how did they dif­fer from what you actu­ally received and pro­duced?

I don’t think I had any cer­tain expec­ta­tion. It sounded like a fun project and I was excited to see what would come out of it.

Do you have any upcom­ing shows, events, or projects? Basi­cally, what’s on the hori­zon for you?

Yeah this com­ing month, Decem­ber I have a lot going on. There are three group shows that I’m par­tic­i­pat­ing in:

1. 111 Minna Gallery, 111 at 111 in San Fran­cisco, open­ing recep­tion: Decem­ber 2nd, 5 — late.
show runs from Decem­ber 2, 2010-January 30, 2011

2. Part-Time Stu­dios, Small Jawns in Philadel­phia, open­ing recep­tion: Decem­ber 3rd, 6 — 10pm

3. Swarm Gallery, Things are Expand­ing in Oak­land, open­ing recep­tion: Decem­ber 10, 6-8pm
Show runs from Dec 10 2010-January 16, 2011

The art­work that will be shown in this show is a col­lab­o­ra­tive audio/visual instal­la­tion with my wife, Mahtab Habib­ian. I cre­ated a series of paint­ings based on a song Mahtab wrote enti­tled Bal­lad of Ron­nie Lee (Gard­ner). Since nei­ther Mahtab nor I are expe­ri­enced per­form­ers we gave 10 tal­ented musi­cians the lyrics to the song and asked them to add music to the lyrics and record the song in their own cho­sen style. The result is five incred­i­ble per­for­mances, in diverse styles includ­ing hip-hop, opera, elec­tron­ica, and rock.

The five record­ings are by: The Beast­mas­ter and Edi­son, Brian Markey, Cemetar­i­ans (Jimmy Olson and Reed Olson), Melanie Ander­son and Jes­sica Hoff­schnei­der, Rev­e­la­tion (Tad Gon­za­lez and Evan Martin)

Also at Swarm Gallery CDs with all five record­ings will be for sale. I’ll also have the record­ings for sale online after the open­ing.

Thanks Jake!