I joined The Studio: April Cole’s Facebook community of mixed media artists, earlier this year and decided to participate in the July group project, called Travelling Canvas. You send a canvas off and it travels round a small number of others, who each add something to it and in the end, it comes back to you. I’ve just sent off this starter canvas to an artist in Minnesota.

It felt odd, to be doing a piece of art for others to add to and was aware that my canvas was the first layer of a palimpsest of 4 layers. I had to choose to do something that could be overwritten without too much difficulty.

As I’m working on a private project Below The Line I decided to use some of the studies and forms I’ve already accumulated, the idea being that I’d do a suite of similar surfaces to pass round to myself to add to!

So I came up with the idea of creating an atmosphere for the project, which the other artists would populate with their own forms and colours. I will also get a chance to add to a canvas. It’s a bit scary, I must admit. It feels like tampering with someone else’s artwork. Consent has been given though, so it is not really tampering!

I like sending work out into the world. It is a way of meeting other artists you would not normally get to know. And I always take the opportunity to learn something about their neck of the woods. Minnesota is in the US Mid-West. It’s the US’s 32nd state. The name is Dakota Indian, and means sky-tinted water and it’s also known as Land of 10,000 Lakes. The majority of residents descend from German and Scandinavian settlers. It’s scenery, wildlife and landscape in general is spectacular.  Great place for walking. Read up on it yourself!

Ann