Excerpt from Hughen/Starkweather, Artist Pair ‘On the Brink’, by Charles Desmarais, San Francisco Chronicle, October 11, 2017.
Descriptions of their working method may sound academic, but research is just a starting point for art that is sublimely visual. The work displays a clear logic — an artistic geography — with an underlying emotional geology to match.
Hughen/Starkweather is hardly a new collaboration. Amanda Hughen and Jennifer Starkweather met in 1998, when they had studios across the corridor from each other as artists in residence at Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin County. Even then, they saw affinities in their interests and their art. The collaborative has had a share of success many others would envy. Just this year, that included a winning exhibition at Minnesota Street Projects (just closed) and a Bolinas Museum show, “Hughen/Starkweather: Where Water Meets Land,” on view through Nov. 12.
When the pair first began to work together, the marks they made were on separate sheets, one a paper base and the other a transparent overlay. Gradually, the artists began to accept the idea of printing, drawing and painting on the same sheet of paper. Still, though they meet often for research and to discuss progress (“two brains, four eyes,” they point out, in unison) they don’t work side by side. They shuttle partially completed works back and forth across San Francisco, each artist making her contributions independently, in the privacy of her own studio.
Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle
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