This is a project by Barry Comer and Richard Guest.

Barry and I have never met in the physical world. He is based in Louisville, Kentucky and I live on the edge of London. I have long admired his drawings. So I jumped at the chance when Barry suggested we work together.

At the top of this post you can see Barry by Barry and Richard by Richard. Having agreed to work on each other’s images in a game of consequences/ exquisite corpse kind of way, we swapped self-portraits.

The idea was to pass the images back and forth a set number of times, each adding to (or subtracting from) both portraits, and responding to the other’s changes. In my case, I had a hidden agenda and sought:

(a) to bring out my idea of who Barry is (based on his blog and my knowledge of him from emails etc), in the picture and make him central to it.

(b) to make myself disappear.

Here are the in-between stages in sequence:

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And here are the final images:

Barry Comer, 2015

Barry Comer, 2015

Richard Guest, 2015

Richard Guest, 2015