Collaborations - Hive Minded

The day we locked down, after my final gig-shift, my friend Vashty came over to drop off a canvas. One of the things I've been pushing for in the past few months has been a collective between myself, my partner Mikey, and three of our artist friends. I even started to work on a website for us, which I'll be getting back to now that I've exhausted my supply of videogames to distract me.

For our first project, I wanted to do collaborations with everyone else, so that we could showcase a blending of styles. I got Vashty's just in time to work on. The rest will have to wait until it's safer to travel about in public and meet in groups again.

So the above piece is her linework. She drew these two characters in her own style from a Polish 60's movie called Daisies. I gave them colour and a background.

I was drawn to bees for a couple reasons, general survival being one of them. I opted away from my beloved almond milk recently because of how destructive the almond crop has been to those bee population. It's all about demand. Use of pesticides has increased dramatically to improve the crop yield in the past years, and with it the death rate of the bee population has spiked.

Now it seems more relevant, since we're many of us online engaged in something of a hive mind. Working together in our little cells.

What a privilege it is to have access to the internet right now. I've been seeing more collaborations than ever, now that the majority of people are abiding lockdown rules. Right now, Mikey is (with much technological pain) working on a musical collaboration. We're not very wealthy, so our editing software is pretty obsolete. It isn't compatible with the full gamut of file-types he's receiving from the other collaborators. We're working through it. There are also Mac-PC file barriers to cross. One step at a time.

Vashty is now working on a collage collaborative piece from a painting of mine and some of Mikey's photography. I'll share that when I see the finished product.

I may have a couple more paintings to share from the past few months that haven't been up here yet, but probably not enough to share a post every day. We'll see how it goes.

I hope you're all safe and healthy out there. :)