There were several guiding questions for me as a participant throughout the duration of this project : To what extent is creativity thwarted and nurtured when people team up ? How can working outside one ’ s artistic vocabulary , style , or use of color enhance and expand us as artists ? Is the process worth the inherent difficulties ? After the project was completed , I surveyed participants in New England WAX to get a sense of the pros and cons of the project .
Because the nature of the project was response , each artist was faced with the same initial dilemma : to create a work that related to their partners in such a way that the two became a unified whole . While a range of techniques and connections were utilized in this project , the manner in which artists created responses to their partner ’ s work seemed to fall into categories : “ connection ,” “ extending the metaphor ,” “ opposition / contrast ,” and “ reproduction / enlarging ”.
Artists who created “ connecting ” responses did so through color , repeated pattern or form , or through theme , and sometimes all three at once . Artist Pamela Dorris DeJong responded to Mary Krebs Smyth ’ s Connections with Past Generations by developing the stitched patterns present in Smyth ’ s work into a quilt pattern in Seasons : Layers of Time . Smyth ’ s color choices were representative of the farm fields where she grew up , so DeJong selected stripes of color that represented layers of the rocky New England coast where she lives .