The Red Truck and The Game
After working on it four months, Mom and I recently finished the red truck. A gift for our talented and trusted auto mechanic. His name is Tom, and he has cared for our family's cars for ages. We know that our vehicles are in good hands with him. He feels like one of the family.
Tom had a piece of art hung above the counter in the lobby that we thought didn't work for his business. Well, that's a polite way of putting it. The painting was visually agitating! It was an abstract. The colors were dark and dreary. In the center of the painting there appeared to be a door to a cave and there appeared to be a dark blood color oozing out the door.
We teased him about it for years.
"Was the artist depressed or angry?" We chided.
"What is that? It looks like there was a gory murder in there!”
He smiled, but seemed unflappable. He didn't seem to care one way or the other.
Mom and I looked at each other and silently made a decision. Being painters ourselves, we asked him if he would like a piece of art that was welcoming to his customers and reflective of his business.
"Sure," he said in his easy-going, western-man way.
That was the day we decided to paint him an old-style red truck. We found a stock image online of an old chevy or ford from 40’s sitting in a western landscape. Perfect.
We bought a large 40 x 30 canvas and began to play "the Game."
"The Game" is when two artists work on art in collaboration. I've done it with a friend on a long ferry ride with pens and watercolors, doing fun designs together, trying to make it unified.
"Here," I said, handing her the watercolor journal. "Your turn. See what you can make out of that."
I've played the Game with my friend Nancy of a large still-life for her living room. We had gathered a small watermelon, a couple of lemons and some roses in a vase as our inspiration.
"You work on the right, and I'll work on the left," I said, scooting over to give her some room to paint.
In collaboration, I’ve also co-created poems, new culinary dishes, and collages.
I've never played the Game to create a gift for someone before, but Mom and I gave it a shot.
She would work on it one day, and I would work on it the other.
I sketched it out. She blocked in the basic colors. I did the truck and the mountains. She worked on the background and sky (I call her the sky queen. I'm the color queen.)
We both struggled with the trees. Too much detail would take away from the truck. I may not have chosen to do the trees in the shape my mom finally laid out. She had made oblong yellow and orange shapes, but, they worked against the mountain in a pleasing way without drawing attention from the star of the show, the truck.
She wasn't crazy about the color in my mountain.
"Too dark, I think."
I softened the blue colors and I saw she was right. We both knew that the shadow under the truck was off, but we didn't know what to do. Until one day, she figured it out by adding blue to the olive green. Lastly, we finished the foreground together, making thin suggestive lines for the grasses and shrubs.
Working with somebody else on projects can't help but push you out of your comfort zone and give you new ways of seeing. It forces you to be flexible and open to new styles, which naturally emerge from the energies of two artists working together.
The game forces flexibility- to release any preconceived ideas, which is a big bonus in making art. You can't help but be open to possibility when you can't singularly control the outcome. Working together means you can solve problems that come up. And besides being fun, when it's finished, you get to celebrate with someone!
Finally, we both knew it was done (or as done as our current skills could take us.) We looked at it in satisfaction.
Tomorrow I’m taking my car to Tom for a service. I’ll admit to having a tinge of apprehension. Giving art to somebody is tricky business. Art is subjective, like beauty and love. What if he doesn’t like it? What if he feels obligated to put it on his wall?
Awkward.
But one thing we know for sure though, he will know how much we appreciate him.