The Collaboration of Friendship

by Cris Pope, Lyn Barchett, Tammy Bowers, Mary Inman, and Melanie Crysler

The artwork, “The Collaboration of Friendship” was created by a group of four women artists from varied backgrounds, experiences, educational areas, skills and talents. It began with the realization that our friendship is a unique type of collaboration in and of itself. Like other collaborations, our friendship requires give and take, accommodating our differences, compromising when we don’t agree, understanding, empathy and compassion. We brought our talents together to illustrate how our friendship is collaboration while actually collaborating to create a piece of art. We believe this resulted in an artwork that is made better by the contributions of each of us.

We chose to use mixed media for each of these twelve artworks which allowed us greater freedom in our choices of tools and materials. Each canvas is an artwork to which we each contributed. We were able to insert our own personalities by choosing specific materials for each canvas to enhance and strengthen the pieces and use the skills and talents we each possess. We felt the faces of the women on each canvas were important to convey our message that, while this artwork was about and created by a collaboration of women artists who are friends, it represents the friendships of women from all around the world.

Twelve individual collaborative canvases were then combined to create one large 36” x 48” artwork. We believe this resulted in an artwork that proves the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, as with the collaboration of friendship.