Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber on BBIC

Julia Rothman over at Book By Its Cover has just put up a great interview with Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber. The interview focuses largely on their collaboration and how exactly it functions. At this point, they have been working together for 15 years! Considering that trying to "collaborate" on the DandQ twitter with Tom for even 15 minutes is a remarkable challenge, it's incredible that these two continue to meet up and paint every single week and, even, still like each other.

Here's a little excerpt:

Do you have roles? For example does one of you always write the text, draw the people, etc?

Neil: We have strengths and will ask each other to do things we might not like doing ourselves, but we both do lots of everything. We try to paint similarly so that everything blends together. Michael always wants me to do any writing that goes on the paintings, but we usually work out the wording together.

Michael: I don’t like to see my writing on a painting—It’s like hearing a recording of my voice—I find it off-putting. Within our collaborative work, it seems like our painting is getting less distinguishable. It used to be more obvious who contributed what.

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