John Rainis and I created a series of silkscreen collage artworks for the Pen Pals art show in 2019. There were three different versions of this collaboration, and each was a little different.
First pass
Our initial concept for this piece was inspired by a conversation we had about a coffee table John had built. He took some found materials and pieced it together to create the center piece of his living room. And boy was he excited about it. We talked through translating that same process into an art piece, collaging different artworks from both our styles and interchanging them on different materials. We took a trip to the hardware store and grabbed some slat wood for printing on.
Second pass
When we finished our first attempt at this project, we were really happy with the process. We saw the potential in what we were doing and learned a lot as we were creating our prints. Our main regret was not being more intentional on our color pallet. We were just grabbing inks off the rack and going from there. On our second pass, we decided to approach the silkscreen collage with a predetermined order of inks. The results were really amazing. The work was created along 8′ strips of wood, and then split into a vertical and horizontal piece.
Open studios version
After we finished the second version of our silkscreen collage, we talked about doing another piece live throughout South Boston Open Studios. We’d be hanging around all weekend chatting to people anyways, we might as well create something fun in the process. We worked a little smaller on this version but kept a similar intentional color palette process.
This series of silkscreen collages is one of my favorite projects that I’ve worked on in the studio here in Boston. If you’re interested in working on something like this, please reach out. Below you’ll find a short process video we took while working on the second pass.