In almost every art form, collaboration is integral, if not vital in
inspiring and evolving an artist’s career. But most painters,
printmakers and sculptors prefer to work in isolation. There is one
exception to that rule—graffiti. In the world of street art,
collaboration is pretty much the norm, with artists putting up pieces
side by side on a wall or a train, sometimes working into each other’s
characters or, over time, putting new works overtop old. Think, too, of
gallery installations by longtime partners/graffiti artists Barry McGee
and Margaret Kilgallen, where whole walls are taken over by a patchwork
of interwoven styles. That is exactly where the beauty lies in this
magnificent book by James Kirkpatrick (see his work at Studio 21) and
Peter Thompson, two artists who’ve been collaborating together and with
others their whole lives. The playful collaborative paintings and
drawings bask in the interplay between Thompson’s well-controlled
characters and Kirkpatrick’s unravelling abstractions, creating
dream-like scenes that demand careful exploration. Some pieces were
also worked into by Juxtapoz mag heroes Marc Bell, Nick Di
Genova and (Paper Rad member) Beau Labute, which only illustrates the
potential when these guys stay up passing around sheets of paper.
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This article appears in Jan 22-28, 2009.