Collaboration with Mar Bejarano
These paintings — Cosmos, The Eagle North to Nowhere, Symbiosis, and Dark Hearts are collaborative works between Mar Bejarano and Lori Schwilling.
Mar: "The best for me is to collaborate because you can learn and you can teach at the same time, making peace and making love. And the people who don’t need to collaborate…, it is because they think that they are the best, and that’s never true. In any collaboration you need to be the medium for the communication, to communicate something. It’s the same problem and point to learn in any collaboration, how to take something that isn’t you but make it yours."
Lori: "My first thought was, 'Oh, how fun!' It was harder than I anticipated. Forms I labored over were effortlessly covered by marks he nonchalantly introduced. A design of which I was fond was obliterated by a wall of drips. Fierce arguments ensued about relationship and agreements. At one point I was so angry we didn’t talk for days. "
The Freedom Price
While I was in Iraq from 2013-2015, Jassim Al-Asadi, who honors me with his friendship, introduced me to the esteemed translator Amir Doshi of Nasiriya. This 4-panel painting is inspired by the Iraqi protests that began on 1 October, 2019, and a personal friend's alcohol related suicide earlier the same year.
In correspondence during the early months of the protests Amir wrote that the lives lost were "the freedom price". These events may seem unrelated, even in opposition philosophically, but to me they are both about the price of freedom. These 4 panels are offered as a collection. Please message for more information.