For Love Not Money

Just before Christmas I was contacted via e-mail by my Mauritian collaborator in this big international For Love Not Money project. An introduction, a little bio (25 year old art student) and just making sure I was on board. I sent a reply a few days later, also asking if there was a preference in how to divide up the work. I offered such possibilities as half and half, creating elements to work around, or producing a background. A response came back a few days later, asking me to produce a background to be printed over. No problem.

So what to do? To be true to my artistic style I wouldn't want to do a simple geometric/abstract background. No, it will have to be a scene of some kind. Earlier this week I put the question to the critique group. The quickly achieved consensus was that it should be something related to boardwalks. It makes sense. It's obviously an area of interest for me. The core concept of my series (the seeking of transient pleasures of life) fits in easily with the parameters of the overall project. My counterpart's homeland seems to be a classic tropical island and has many resort beaches, so the concept shouldn't be too alien.

I thought about it a bit over the past several days. Since whatever I do will be partly printed over, it shouldn't be too dark, so I'll be skipping the black ink, just going with pale colors. I'm thinking 2 or 3, maybe even doing it as a reduction print. But before I deal with that I have to come up with a design. My boardwalk project has set me up with dozens of photos and sketches of boardwalk scenes, so I spent some time looking through those, making notes. Then up at the Studio today I took some of these pieces and played with various compositions at the approximate scale of the card. Some examples can be seen in the above photo. Most of them combine bits of pieces of architecture from Seaside and Asbury. (Locals here might object to these imaginary juxtapositions, but I figure no one in Mauritius or Estonia will know or care) None of the eight compositions from today are likely the answer, but they may point the way.