Last month it was my great pleasure to be invited to the studio of Ivy Stranger and Ernst Worth, which lies above the wild coast of Sonoma. After an impressive lunch and a wander around the property, we visited their workspace a steel building in the redwoods.
Their paintings are raw, determined, and energetic. There is always a place to begin but it seems to me no place to end, with many places to rest and wonder. The distances traveled, the adventures entertained, the emotions exposed. This is a body of work created within.
A collaboration unlike I have come across. One that would seem to present the viewer with a third entity, a third eye, a third consciousness integrated without ego or judgment.
Can the simple act of being tied together necessarily eventuate creativity? After a conversation with the artists, it seems clear that neither takes sole responsibility for the work. ” We look at a piece when the completion is clear and say to each other I could never have painted that on my own.”
Using a dynamic mix of often in-house produced materials, the canvases are stretched on the studio walls and sized with rabbit skin glue and this becomes the ground upon which painting and drawing rest. There is a sense of performance, a record of movement sometimes restrained by one or the other painters, moments of abandon, marks, lines, and dimensions connected in some sort of ecstatic ritual. Art for the resilient mind.
Howard Worlitze