I remember once taking my daughter and two of her friends to a sidewalk chalk art competition in downtown Fort Lauderdale. The three of them were all excited and soon had all of their artistic supplies laid out on the sidewalk beside their designated spot. It all started out real smooth, but then, well, let’s just say they had artistic differences that resulted in a little huffiness. About halfway through, they wiped out everything and started all over and somehow got through it.
I understood the difficulty of trying to come together creatively with some sort of unified vision. It’s not that I’m not a team player. I mean I’m willing to work really hard for the sake of a group, but creative works, whether it’s writing short stories, gardening, drawing or painting little flowers all over a wall, has always been the sort of thing I enjoyed doing alone because it provides the quiet space I need to let my mind wander to the places it needs to go. Selfish as it sounds, it’s my little space and I don’t always want to share it. But I’m sometimes in awe of people who can write songs together or in the case of two Miami artists, paint on the very same canvas.
Stephanie Rodriguez and Angelica Clyman met about a year ago when Rodriguez was teaching classes at ArtCenter and happened across Clyman’s studio. Clyman wasn’t in her studio but Rodriguez left her a note telling her how much she admired the way she painted hands. “They were very expressive and reminded me of German Expressionism,” Rodriguez recalls. “About a week later, she was in her studio and I introduced myself. She remembered my message. We decided to meet up and we were just drawn to each other’s personalities and our very different artistic styles. We found out that our philosophy was very similar and we thought it would be a fun experiment to work together.”
So they began brainstorming and eventually collaborating, initially on separate canvases with the thought of creating “Beyond Reflection,” a diptych series in which they explore their identities as female artists. “As we continued working together in our studios, we found that our paintings evolved very organically. We ended up with with similar color schemes and compositions. Later, we began to develop works where we painted on the same surface together. We at first came up with sketches on our own, based on a theme of our choice, then combined the strongest elements. Each of us work on one half of the canvas, then we switch. After a few switches, it’s difficult to tell who began what! We don’t know if other artists work this way, we just find that this works for us. We have learned a lot about each other and have grown as artists through this collaboration. Although our individual styles appear very different, our philosophy is the same, so when we work together we don’t consider style, we just let our ideas move us.”
The photo atop this post is Rodriguez and Clyman at work on their first diptych, “First Reflection” and at upper left is the finished piece. “We decided that it would be best for our first theme to be portraits of each other,” Rodriguez says.
The two artists, who now collaborate as Janus Bridge Art Collective, have also created “My Sweet 16″ (pictured at right), an oil-on-paper work that will be on exhibit in “Love Thy Liberty,” which opens 7-11 p.m. Sept. 24 at 1310 Gallery in Sailboat Bend Artist Lofts in Fort Lauderdale. The work was inspired a man who was jilted by his 16-year-old fiance a day before they were to wed and went on to build the Coral Castle for his “Sweet Sixteen.”
Ed Leedskalnin constructed the Coral Castle in Miami as a haven for his rejection-fed fantasies,” Rodriguez says in a statement about the work she and Clyman recent produced. “Then he wrote A Book in Every Home, in which he fashioned strict rules for women to follow, as a way to deal with his misfortunes in matters of the heart. Although Ed’s ideas remained on the fringes of popular thought, similar anti-feminine judgments have been widely accepted in the past and are still permeating mainstream culture. Our image, ‘My Sweet 16, is a glimpse into this power-grasping consciousness.”
Keep up with Janus Bridge via Janusbridge.com. As the artists put it on their new site, “We chose to name our art collective after Janus, a Roman god with two connecting faces that look outward in opposite directions. We identify with this image because although our paintings are stylistically different, we share one philosophy. The fruits of our collaboration answer the question: ‘What would happen if two sides of the same coin met?’”
