Many people cringe at the thought of creating a piece of art, then giving it to someone else to finish.
This is exactly what I thought when I first heard of collaborative journaling. There was no way I was going to take the trouble of creating something unique to me then handing it over to someone to put their art in it.
My thoughts went back to 6th grade when we were creating Christmas decorations for our classroom. I was in charge of Santa’s reindeer. I painstakingly drew and cut out 9 reindeer; never forgetting Rudolph; Santa, sleigh and a bag full of presents all out of brown butcher paper, and laid them out on the schoolroom floor. I then cut two slits in each reindeer side and threaded ribbon through them to string them together.
The trouble came when someone asked to be put on my one-person reindeer team. I thought my deer would be safe if I gave this person the small decorations to finish since I had done most of the work.
A few minutes later the excited student ran back to me and asked me how her work looked. I was horrified. I won’t go into details, but I knew I had to grit my teeth and try not to hurt her feelings. After all: she had tried her best. Still I vowed that no one would ever “help” me with my art again.
Fast forward 40 years. My Frankensteinian reindeer team came back to me as I thought about taking a class that would involve a collaboration piece with not one, but at least five other “artists”. The horror. (Cue the lightening, thunder and the offstage mad laughter.)
But, I decided to take a chance. To make a long story longer I will say that I not only wound up taking the class a second time, I lead one of the groups.
The classes were held at the Denver Art Students League. The full art project lasted one year. Here is a brief rundown of how it went.
Before we started our art journals we discussed a general theme. Under this theme we each were to pick a sub theme for our own book. This may not be absolutely necessary but it helped to keep us focused. To keep it as open as possible we chose the theme “Two Words”.
This seemed easy enough to do at first. I found it challenging to come up with a two word phrase that I liked. I came up with “These Dreams.”
Surprisingly, one of the first things we were asked to do was to keep a journal. That’s right. We were to keep a written log of the journey we were about to go on in the next year. We were to keep notes of our thoughts as we received the next book in the mail and sent off the one we had just contributed to. I call it a journal journal. The journal journals were for your eyes only.
We devised a schedule for sending the art journals. Each journal was to be completed and sent out by a certain date of the month.
Each artist was to create a blank journal with enough pages so that everyone could add art. The rule was to create two facing pages, known as a spread, in each book you received. The journal was to have a decorative cover, a sign in page, and the first spread done by the original artist. There was also to be included a thoughts page so that each artist can add her comments to your journal about their contribution.
For the better part of the year I delighted in getting fantastic works of art in the mail. I couldn’t wait to open what I considered my gifts and adding art to them. With each book, (Life Voyager, Letting go, If Only) I logged my thoughts in my journal journal about the creation process.
When all the books were done we met again to discuss our art show. Did I forget to mention that we were planning to have an art show at the end of all this?
This was also held at the Art Students League in Denver. The show was titled Eight artists: Two Words: Infinite Possibilities. (Do you get the two word theme here?)
Needless to say we had a blast. We were so sorry to see this year-long journey end that some of us decided to do it again.
If you are more interested in the collaborative art making process you can contact Judith Cassel-Mamet at jcmamet@comcast.net for more information. Judith is an artist and teacher who holds classes at the Denver Art Students League and other places around Colorado.
2 pages of a book.
Keep creating
