Artists are often portrayed as unconcerned about time. Mark Arts has been holding the Versus: A Live Art Battle competition since 2013, which flies in the face of that notion. Once a year, they give a group of artists an audience, a canvas and 20 minutes to finish an artwork. The audience votes, and judges help decide a winner who then exhibits the following year.
Torin Andersen sat down with last year’s winner, John Pirtle, and this year’s, Kent Broberg, about strategies for tackling the exhibit … and how the competition has affected their work.
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John Pirtle likes his chaos, and Kent Broberg likes his peace.
“I don't know how you like to work, but I like to have multiple things going simultaneously,” Pirtle said. “Like, kind of the more chaotic, the better.”
“For me, it's quiet,” Broberg said. “Now there are a lot of abstract people that will be playing music that will get inspiration for that. But for me, it's nothing.”
Pirtle’s exhibition with Elisabeth Owens, titled “Subcreators,” is currently on display at Mark Arts. Pirtle said time management is crucial when juggling this year's upcoming exhibition along with family responsibilities. Both men have kids at home and agree that creating takes time.
“Knowing you have kids,” Pirtle said, “and it's just like any second you have to work is time well spent.”
“Paintings don't ‘just come,’” Broberg said. “You need a little bit of time to get in that creative mode.”
“And that's kind of where my head was at with the sketches and kind of building upon those,” Pirtle said. “If something wasn't working here, I would just try to get stuff out there.
But it's challenging finding time when their families have needs. Being apart from loved ones can be a lot to ask.
“Taking time away,” Broberg said, “there's always a little bit of guilt, I guess.”
“I would say I probably experienced a fair share of that this last year,” Pirtle said. “Just pretty happy about not missing a lot of that but at the same time those weekends are just precious time to be logging in the hours.”
The competition itself and the 20-minute time constraint help shape how the next year's work is executed.
“It was kind of fun to have a limitation,” Pirtle said.
“Exactly,” Broberg agrees, “and those chances that happen in art sometimes can come out a little bit more.”
“Yeah, absolutely,” Pirtle said. “I discovered oil sticks and pigment sticks. Drawing is really kind of my bread and butter a little bit, and that allowed me to kind of paint in a drawing way.”
“It helps … your brushwork a little bit more intuitively,” Broberg said. “Letting go of some of those inhibitions, especially, you know, my love of abstract art.”
Broberg leans into his painting style as an advantage to work his paintings a little less.
“As you know,” Pirtle said, “in art it can be very easy to overwork paintings — to do too much. Definitely, and there's a balance of chance in my abstract art, in chance, and in in planning or deliberateness.”
Both artists agree that large-scale works can fill spaces. And this exhibit is a good excuse to fill the walls at Mark Arts.
“I'd never worked on the scale for some of these bigger pieces that are like pushing 6x6,” Pirtle said, “but I knew that was definitely something I wanted to try to tackle.”
“So I like mid- to large-scale paintings,” Broberg said. “It's if you go too small, and it's hard to get the relationships that I like to see between line and form — different colors. You can experiment though, and get ideas for larger paintings.”
Early in the planning for the exhibit, artists are expected to sign a work agreement for the year's production with a list of dates and expected progress.
“In the artist agreement,” Pirtle said, “it was like between 25 and 50. I think that is the number that we land on.
Pirtle has about 40 large paintings with several drawings on display. Broberg is aiming to do about the same.
“I'm going to do larger pieces,” Broberg said, “quite a few, maybe a few smaller, but 35 to 40 is what I was thinking.”
Managing an exhibit on such a tight timeline can be a delicate dance.
“I don't have the most organized brain, but I will,” Broberg said. “I think what'll happen is I'll end up reassessing a couple months into it, ‘How far have I gotten, and do I need to do more?’ And I don't procrastinate until the end.”
