Standing before a blank, wall-sized canvas, Pamela Holmes holds out her right arm as Winston Gourley unravels a tattered gray Ace bandage that looks as though it was scavenged from a battlefield. Around their wrists, he winds it tightly until the two of them are bound in solidarity.
“I’m the designated wrapper,” Gourley says, his British accent easing into a laugh.
In the background, The Clash tear through the opening track of “London Calling.” The couple are cocooned in a large tent studio outside the DIY house Pamela built with her ex-husband more than 30 years ago. The wooded 15-acre property above Timber Cove might as well be perched on the edge of the world, it’s so remote.
With their free hands, they rummage through a box of charcoal — dead, dried grapevines they cut and burned themselves — to find the right tool, their fingers turning sooty in the mix. Then, as if cued by something in the music, they start to move — an awkward tango at first, each one pushing and pulling as they find a rhythm, bodies lurching and swaying, their hands traveling across the canvas leaving a trail of black scrapes and lines in flurries. When the charcoal breaks under the pressure, they grab a new one.
“It’s a bit of a dance,” says Gourley. “And there are those moments where part of you really needs to go to the top left-hand corner, but the other person really needs to go to the bottom right-hand corner.”
There’s an athleticism to it, magnified by their breathing, like two prisoners bound on a chain gang, their work detail to render a painting instead of pounding out a road.
Next, they pick up a homemade wax stick, adding white streaks that resemble chalk marks. Then they re-tie their hands so they can both hold a brush and splatter jet-black India ink across the 80’’x 92’’ canvas, pausing only to dunk the splayed brush in fresh paint. Still bound, they walk outside and bring in two chairs to reach the highest corners of the nascent work of art.
“It’s all about dismantling one’s ego,” says Holmes.
Gourley likes to call it “a shared imagination,” something they never knew existed.
It could easily be a gimmick — the art world is full of them — but instead, it opened a portal into an entirely different way of making art for both of them.
“It’s really freeing,” Holmes says. “Neither of us make these paintings. The work that comes out of it is never predictable, and it’s not anything like either of our own works.”
Both are lifelong artists. She grew up in Pasadena, graduating with an MFA from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. Gourley was raised on the British island of Guernsey off the coast of France, graduating from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, Canada. Her work is more textural, sometimes coming to life in cement plastered on wood boards — almost an extension of the Holmes Wilson custom cement furniture business she founded years ago before recently retiring. Gourley, who has shown his art internationally in the past as Patrick Gourley, is drawn to both color field paintings and encaustic works that play with melted wax and resin. When he moved in with Holmes several years ago, they tried creating their own works in the same studio, but “it didn’t make any sense,” he says. “It felt weird.”
Inspired to collaborate, they tried a few drawings where they both added layers. But they realized “the problem with doing this is I’m just laying my (stuff) on yours,” Gourley says. “But if we’re tied up together, who’s in charge? Who’s in control? And then to have anything good happen, you have to give up those things. You have to give up all your habits.”
After the first painting they’ve never looked back. In this alternate universe, she adopted the alter ego “Ivy Stranger” and he became “Ernst Worth.” Together they are Stranger Worth, signing paintings “ISEW.”
They’ve even dreamed up their own vocabulary; words and phrases such as “Do the Dusinki” and “Lewst” and “Emerlink” are scribbled on scraps of paper and pinned to the studio walls as reminders. One imaginary word,“Eachin,” helps anchor their artist’s statement that reads like a manifesto: “Eachin steps away from the personal and opens up to the collective…Eachin welcomes surrender over resistance…Eachin carries no suitcases.”
But abandoning your ego, and surrendering old habits and artistic tendencies, is often easier said than done.
“In the beginning, I would cry,” says Holmes, still wistful, but able to look back now and laugh. “It was that hard.”
As they struggled to paint together, it was “hard not to feel protective of something in the painting that you liked,” she continues.
Gourley remembers the time Holmes undid the bindings and ran out the door, screaming, “I’m never painting again!”
Even on this day, midway through the session, tension lies just beneath the surface. When asked what they’ve learned about the other person through this process, Gourley replies immediately, “I love her and I hate her.”
They both laugh as she adds, “That’s very accurate. There are times when I just despise him.”
With each abstract work — there are a handful hanging around the studio, each one very different — they keep coming back to the canvas daily, adding more layers. Any discussion of what shapes or themes might be materializing is delayed for many sessions to keep the work somewhat dreamy and unpredictable.
A week after they embarked on the painting with the charred vines, they’re finished. Layered over the early black and white scars is a splash of green paint and a bright red flourish, almost like a smoke cloud of blood floating in a green sea. After coming back to it multiple times, even flipping the canvas upside down at one point, Holmes says they finally started talking about symbols they saw in the work “about the same time we started hating each other.”
“It’s been a tough one,” adds Gourley.
“This was an extremely challenging piece to make, for some reason,” she says. “Sometimes trying to break through your identities is an ambition. It’s not always easily achieved. Sometimes we butt heads more than we do other times.”
In many ways, it sounds like any couple — artistic or otherwise — working through their issues on any given day.
So far, they’ve only shown Stranger Worth paintings at the Gualala Arts Center, and hope to reach a larger audience. They’ve also thought about what it would be like to facilitate sessions for other couples trying to work through their issues, tying them together before the canvas and seeing what takes shape.
A few of their friends have tried the technique. One couple, the wife an artist and the husband a physicist, were working on their first painting and “she was just leaving the guy completely behind,” Holmes recalls. “All of a sudden, she stood back and looked at us, and said, ‘I’m such a control freak.’ The next piece they made was mind-blowing. He was finally able to come alive.”
Holmes and Gourley both bristle at the concept of couples’ art therapy, but if they were to market it, Holmes has a pitch.
“Come and try the tie-up,” she says in a way that makes it sound almost like a dance or the chorus to a song — something so catchy you can’t resist.
“I think that’s really what it boils down to,” Gourley says. “We’re doing something that’s so primal. That act of making marks together on a surface connects us directly to our ancestors.”