Eric Van Wyk and I decided to try "collaborative painting" to raise funds for the UFD Neighborhood Learning Center. It was a fun experiment, although I think both us us would have preferred not to have had a time restriction (maybe allowing us to pass the canvas back and forth a few more times) or the gnawing, nagging feeling that we needed to create something that could be hung in somebody's house.

Eric started off his canvas like this. The initial concept began with an image that stuck in his mind, of an ambulance driving with a sunset in the background, as though driving away from the sunset.

I think we both just looked at the canvases for a week or two after we swapped. It's hard to paint on someone else's work, and into someone else's imagery. I had trouble deciding what to do. The red stripes up top reminded me of the packaging of U2's latest album (How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb), so I was going to make a little mushroom cloud in the distance, where the ambulance was driving away from, but then decided against it.

Here's the final product after it went back to Eric. This piece sold for gobs of money to the prestigious Beiler collection in Washington, DC.

This is what I gave Eric to work with. There are many, many layers of paint on this canvas already. The imagery was semi-random at the end, as I moved away from a few more realistic concepts.

Eric followed the circular theme with some creative edge-work, but was hesitant to get into the middle (as I was with the ambulance and sunset he had started).

I took what Eric had started and I darkened various areas to give it more depth and filled in some more color. A fierce bidding war left one private collector with this painting and another with a tile mosaic (but that's his own fault because he bid on the wrong thing).