Projects
2016 · Volcom Garden
Austin, Texas
With Aaron Glasson · Volcom × SeaWalls
A young figure cradles a whooping crane. The bird’s body opens into water, grasses, sky and landscape, bringing the creature and the places that sustain it into one image.
Created with Aaron Glasson through PangeaSeed Foundation’s SeaWalls initiative and the Sea of Change print project, the mural centred on that gesture of holding.
I wanted to approach protection through the closeness between two living beings, giving an environmental subject an intimate scale.
Aaron and I had crossed paths through other environmental art projects. This wall gave us time to work more closely on a shared composition.
We painted across the same surface, allowing our approaches to intermingle. Decisions about colour, form and atmosphere developed between us as the image took shape.
The collaboration asked us to pay attention to what the other person was doing and find ways to carry it further.
We painted over four intensely hot summer days.
Aaron brought a softness and sensitivity to atmosphere that opened possibilities within my own work. Together, we experimented with translucent applications, layered washes and transitions that allowed one form to merge into another.
Colour accumulated gradually. Water, grasses and sky could move through the figure and bird without every boundary being sharply drawn.
That treatment became part of the subject: the crane belonged to an environment that could not be separated neatly from its body.
Some of the washes, textures and softer tonal transitions I continued exploring afterwards grew from working beside Aaron.
That is one of the lasting pleasures of collaboration. You leave with a painting, but also with ways of working that become available the next time you pick up a brush.
I remember this wall through both kinds of care: the gesture we painted, and the attention we brought to making it together.
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© Jason Botkin