Trumpet to the Tulips

Artists: Kristen Letts Kovak, Sarah Jacobs, Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann

“Every once in a while one should do a crazy experiment, like blowing the trumpet to the tulips every morning for a month.  Probably nothing would happen, but what if it did?” –George Darwin

The first night that I met Katherine and Sarah, the idea for “Trumpet to the Tulips” was born. We immediately discovered commonalities among our painting practices.  We each systematically established patterns, with the end goal of later negating them, and approached experimentation quite methodically.  Yet, we also shared a desire to be more adaptive in our approaches. So, we formulated a game to disrupt our existing strategies.  We decided to each create one new work that combined elements of the other artists’ paintings . . . probably nothing would happen, but what if it did?.

The paintings in this exhibition are a combination of our independent and collective voices. There are paintings created before our first meeting, artworks produced in response to the game, and collaborative paintings shipped between cities where we worked directly on top of each other’s marks. Additionally, there are a large number of works created within the last year that reflect how each of our painting practices has shifted as a result of our collaboration. We each blew our trumpets in counterpoint and a collective melody emerged.