Like Ed, I also think all my art is derivative, if only subconsciously, from other artists. In fact, I think of other artists as my bosses, owners or managers of my sequential art business. I think collaboration is something I learned from Ed Stastny, during my tour of duty in the trenches of the coffee house drawing sessions in the late 90’s Omaha, and some time spent working with him in Portland, Oregon, also. In fact, I would take it so far as to say that collaboration is the purpose of all arts and crafts. The arts serve to imitate nature, and each other’s evocations of nature, and nature in turn inspires other artists to create all over again.
In the age of VR computing, I would like to see more collaboration online between artists, who share their Photoshop drawing sessions while sipping coffee, perhaps in different time zones, even different countries, but all united in the way that the arts bring us together to share each other’s work with the wider world. I would also like to see people from all walks of life invited into the artists’ studios in order to see the working process, and admire their talent, by sharing the camera with others’ headsets.
Ed, after all, made me aware of Jaron Lanier and his original idea for VR, however less well-developed his methods were at the time.
I think of collaboration is not the means to the end of art, but art as the means to the end of collaboration, sharing, connecting, and communicating, to defeat the purposes of fear and death and drive them back while the world benefits.