Drawn together with Marie Cecile Aptel and Jean Pierre Bourquin
Any working relationship, regardless of its duration or scale, requires compatible partners. Compatible partners include people who disagree or have opposing feelings. In fact, I have found that working cooperatively is most satisfying when my collaborators are unlike me in distinctive ways. Compatibility and differences are not mutually exclusive concepts. I have met many very fine artists on Facebook, whose work has inspired me, and I’ve worked collaboratively with several of them on platforms such as Idroo, Realtime and A Web Whiteboard. These are web applications that are designed to enable the exchange of ideas in an online conference room, but thanks to Chris Fletcher, an artist and teacher in the USA, I discovered that they can also be used to draw people together collaboratively in cyberspace.
One such collaboration was with Marie Cecile Aptel and Jean Pierre Bourquin, two French artists whose work I admire and who have worked closely together in the past. When I approached them, both were excited to participate, and we started a couple of boards together on Realtime. We worked together (at the same time) and also separately on three or four projects. It was interesting to videotape the boards as they were loading, a rather primitive way of documenting the changes, but nonetheless, efficient. I took screen shots of the boards at various stages, some of which accompany this article.
I found myself adopting Jean Pierre’s engaging vocabulary of patterned marks and juxtapositions of textures, and Marie’s exuberant way of using diagonals and highly saturated colors to quickly create dynamic compositions. We could move each other’s marks and shapes around, rotate them, change their color and scale. It was like thinking together in a playful way that I had never experienced before. We found that even though our individual processes were different, they were compatible. In fact, my willingness to appropriate Marie and Jean Pierre’s points of view broadened my vision and ideas about composition, design and color. More importantly, being around them (even if only in cyberspace) and their fearless, exploratory nature has helped me internalize some of these qualities and has changed the way I see their work, and my own.
Carol Heft, HAF editorial
Carol Heft is a New York City based artist and educator. She is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and her work has been exhibited internationally. She teaches Drawing, Painting, and Art History at several colleges in New York and Pennsylvania, and is represented by the Blue Mountain Gallery in New York City.
