Field Studies: Steven Carrelli & Adam Fung

Field Studies is a drawing collaboration that began in 2011, when both artists lived in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois. Field Studies continues presently as a long-distance collaborative art project with Steven Carrelli residing in Chicago, Illinois and Adam Fung living in Fort Worth, Texas. With few exceptions, the drawings are the size of a postcard and executed in pencil on paper. 

The artists begin each drawing without a predetermined goal or end-point. One artist will initiate a drawing, either with images or marks, and then hand it off to the other. The mark-making is typically dynamic and varied. Each artist responds to the other intuitively with the form of the drawing often becoming so unified that the boundary between one’s contribution and the other’s is no longer discernible.

Each drawing, then, is not a visual collision between two artistic languages, but the mutual discovery of a third language, unified and consistent within itself. This ongoing dialog acts as a self-creating archive of investigations into drawing as a medium, the potential of collaboration, and experiments within set parameters and limitations.

Images: (left) Adam Fung, false colored stellar nursery cerulean violet X, oil on linen on panel, 9"x12"

(right) Adam Fung & Steven Carrelli, Field Study (#54), graphite on paper, 7"x5"