Collaboration at any time is a matter or trust and mutual understanding. Committees, musicians and any manner of team and familial groups all manage it more or less successfully. For artists though it is a very different matter. Artists traditionally work alone. When Adelaide based artists Elizabeth Wojciak and Linda Lee decided to extend their friendship and working relationship it was a leap of faith. To paint on each other’s paintings could have been fraught with friendship-ending arguments but Elizabeth said that the tentativeness at the outset soon dissipated and the resulting twenty paintings now hanging in the Main Gallery in Adelaide bear testament to the success of the venture. This is first time I have heard of such a collaboration since Warhol/Basquiat and Khalo/Riviera half a century ago. The leap of faith came with accepting loss of control and even though there was discussion, ostensibly they both created ten backgrounds and foregrounds with only the pictorial reference as a guide.
Described at the opening as work of ‘energy, drive, ambition and humour’, the paintings are entitled Synchronicity, a term suggested by the Swiss psychiatrist Jung to explain the unexplainable. Most artists have little idea where a work will end up, if in fact it does ever have an end point but working in tandem is a quite other matter. Lee’s design sense and Wojciak’s powerful drawing underpins all of the work. Where Wojciak provides the loosely painted background, Lee’s more geometric forms derived from nature, occupy the foreground in juxtaposition.
Conversely, the recognisable Wojciak figurative style with adventurous colour choice in the modelling of the form as foreground motif is complemented by Lee’s patterning. This is particularly noticeable in STANCE where the lemony yellow on the right leg of the female figure continues as a sinuous yellow line set contrapuntally against a warm red courtesy of Lee’s innate sense of colour harmony.
Each artist has a distinct identity and the themes each adopts as working practice emerge from the imagery. Wojciak works extensively with the female figure but the imagery in these works ranges from nudes to portraits.
Lee’s affinity with plants provides a complementary sense of oneness with nature with objects raised in scale to dream-like proportions linking the familiar with the exotic. While the search for exact meaning is in one sense a meaningless pursuit, the end result is an amalgam of personalities as much as anything else.
There was a sense of freedom to this process of collaboration in that each artist could bring to bear their own way of working and the journey from the first work with its geometric divisions of space providing some degree of separation to the last work which is a playful, almost minimal, and full of overlays, it is obvious that a journey of significance has taken place.
There is a sense of joy to this exhibition, in an exuberance generated through colour and form and an optimistic venture into the unknown.