I am thinking often these days of collaboration, of how important this is for our wellbeing. Even with my art, I am increasingly asking others for colour ideas. It began all very innocently two or three weeks ago. I was enjoying my break in one of my favourite cafes in the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood of Vancouver. The owner and her staff appeared to have nothing to do. They were hanging out chatting or doing their Sudoku or crossword puzzles. So I asked them each for a colour. One said blueish grey, the other burgundy. I tried something a little different on my next drawing in order to incorporate these unfamiliar colours. I was so pleased with the result that, since then, I am asking different people to name two to three colours, then I try to use them in my next drawing. This is stretching me and I think it's helping me grow as an artist. So much for the romantic nonsense of the artist as individual and tormented loner.
People aren't always quick on the uptake when I ask for colour ideas. Not everyone, it appears, has much of a colour sense, and I am hoping that through their collaboration with me that they will also experience an enhanced sense and appreciation of colour. It turns out that a lot of people don't have this appreciation. They are not necessarily colour blind. I just don't think that colour is a huge priority with a lot of people, though, ironically, everyone is affected and influenced by colour.
The soft and vibrant greens that surround us in nature during the spring, I think, are an example of how we are influenced by ambient colour. It improves the mood. Of course, the warmer temperatures also help, but without the surrounding colour green, how much poorer our lives. Industry and business are always exploiting colour to manipulate us. You will never find a lot of blue a grocery store or fast food place, and there is a reason for this. You will see green in a lot of institutional settings, but no red; yellow in budget grocery stores but not purple or orange.
It is all collaboration; not necessarily conspiracy, which is why I generally laugh at conspiracy theories. It isn't that we have little secret powerful elites meeting together clandestinely to conspire to rule the world and amass to themselves all the wealth and power, though it would appear so to a lot of people. I think our instinct towards collaboration drives us to plan and work together on things even when we don't know that we are doing it. We are constantly being bombarded by the influences of others while hatching our most original (or so we presume) ideas. This is how things really get done. It is the air that surrounds us. It is the soup we are all living and participating in. Things have never been otherwise accomplished.
We owe our existence as a species to collaboration. Alone, we are too weak and vulnerable. Together our minds can fuse and we can learn to think as one brain, because there is no such thing as an original idea. Everything is derivative because it is all so uniquely human and that is what makes us perpetually interesting. There is nothing wrong with this. It's just a fact of life and of our human existence.
Humbling, perhaps, but who couldn't benefit from a little bit of humility? More than a little bit?
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