And Another Collaboration--

This morning Jacob decided we had time to do another collaboration;  so we climbed up to an area of campus where a pine forest had been planted many years ago in straight rows on a hilltop deep in the forest overlooking some of the farm fields.  It was so beautifully geometric, quiet, aromatic, peaceful in there.  Then we spied an art installation attached to some giant grape vines hanging from one of the trees.  It had hanging bundles made of translucent fabric and pine cones and strange objects showing partly through the fabric of the bundles.  A string of large pearly beads hung down near a bundle made of crochet.  I loved this intervention of something wild in the very tame and orderly forest.

Here on the left is a detail from the bottom of the art piece-- a cream-colored felt flower hanging with two pine cones from a piece of black nylon mesh.  To the right is a quick drawing that I did of some fire pinks, while Jacob photographed them.

We walked around up in the orderly forest for a while, saw a bird blind, a lean-to made out of pine branches, and a small remnant of an old barn.  Nothing struck Jacob very much, so we headed down the hill to a hay barn on the side of a recently- mown field.  And here we struck gold.  I drew the piles of hay that had burst out of their plastic wrappings and were gradually composting at the edge of the woods (on the left).  Then I went and stood just outside the barn where J was photographing and I drew the enormous rolls of new hay in their slick white wrappings.  For our collaboration Jacob photographed the exact scene I had been drawing.

Then we raced out of the field and over to Greenlife for a very late lunch and a little Photoshopping while we ate, putting our work on the same canvas and giving my line sketch the golden tones and mysterious darks that it needed, giving his photograph the graphic punch that the plastic hay rolls gave to the soft and glowy barn scene.