Everson Museum of Art (Syracuse, NY) 60/60 Event

Once again, I participated in the Everson Museum's 60/60 Event fundraiser. It's a great event where 60 different artists come together on the beautiful grounds of the museum and each create an artwork in 60 minutes (pre-event preparation is allowed). I participated a couple years ago with my artist friend Tom Nettle and it was a great time. When this year's solicitation came in the mail, I immediately contacted my good friend and fellow NCS member Anthony Morgan to see if he was interested in doing a collaborative piece. He was excited about doing it. Whereas the last time I participated, Tom and I got together for some compositional planning, this time around Anthony and I did no pre-planning (partially because he lives 5 hours away in Pennsylvania). We each simply brought a box of elements that we thought were interesting. The lack of pre-planning any kind of composition was a bit stressful for me (Anthony might argue that it was more than a bit stressful for me). Upon arriving, Anthony immediately cut the woman and man that you see in the composition. This became one of our primary elements. I was particularly attracted to the B&W automobile element (which I was later informed was a 1969 Fiat 124 Sports Coupe), so we included that. Then it was a case of choosing some additional complementary elements. With the beautiful blue oceanographic map as background, I knew the "orange lady" would fit quite well. We were experimenting with placement and I happened to put the man and woman on the edge of the composition area and onto the matting (I had done this once before with a piece). We agreed that it looked interesting and worked from there. The finished piece came together in just about one hour (thankfully). The way part of the fundraiser works is that folks purchase "raffle" tickets and place them in paint cans located at each of the artists' stations; then one ticket is drawn and the piece goes to that individual. Earlier in the evening, an older gentleman was watching us and commenting about how much he loved what we were doing. He must have put 10 or 15 tickets into our paint can. Unfortunately, when the winning ticket was drawn, he did not win. I REALLY wished that we had gotten his contact information and done a piece for him sometime after the event. He was so enthusiastic about collage. One of the things that was particularly interesting (in a bad way?) was that some folks were hesitant to put tickets into our paint can because they had little idea about what our finished piece would look like (as did we). That's one of the interesting (and powerful?) things about an emergent creative process like collage. I think if people had an opportunity to see the finished piece ahead of time, they would be more interested (i.e., the tickets were drawn within 10 mins of the piece being finished). I will probably suggest this to the organizers of the event for next year. Anyway, here it is...