Chinatown Handbag - Stephen Brameld & Jay Staples

Stephen Brameld and Jay Staples have mastered the practice of collaborative painting. The unique and almost frantic way these artists collaborate, painting simultaneously to create one cohesive and beautifully balanced artwork, is quite remarkable.

To say that the two artists mirror the act of conversation in their practice can feel, to some degree, reductive. In the process of a work’s creation, the two artists’ brushstrokes gain the immediacy of a thousand half-formed notions and budding ideas flowing freely between two minds unburdened of the constricting process of assigning them names. Not only do they seemingly translate the act of thinking into a physical act, they turn it into a dance of conscious and unconscious thought. “There’s never an obvious solution, it needs to sneak up on you, and somehow we both see it.”