05

As explained in an earlier blog post, over two years ago a couple of my friends -- Canadian artist Billy Ma and Brazilian model Paula -- and I worked together on a personal photography project we called "Raw".  Part of this creative undertaking involved shooting a large collection of artistic nude portraits, many of which were never used in our project.  These photographs were filed away on a hard drive and forgotten about, until I stumbled across them once again last year.  I was immediately taken by the simplicity and beauty of the images and felt inspired to "do something" with these portraits.

Recalling British artist Nikki Farquharson's strikingly beautiful mixed media work -- where she integrates photographers' imagery into her own hand-inked custom pop art -- I felt inspired to take a chance and send her a message enquiring about an cross-continental creative collaboration.  Remarkably, Nikki wrote me back almost immediately.  And, since that day nearly 18 months ago, Nikki and I have been partnering on creating "Gaia", a four image series that takes my nude photography of Paula, and wraps her in Nikki's delightful abstract interpretation of the classical Greek elements of Air, Fire, Earth and Water.

Nikki has been wonderful at documenting her work and using her Instagram account to keep me updated on her

painstaking and delicate manual progress.  Today Nikki sent me a link to her blog that shows her work-to-date, along with a short message informing me that she had completed inking the elements and was now ready to move onto incorporating my photographs into her colourful custom artwork.

Nikki's art is simply stunning, and there aren't words for me to express how excited and proud I am to be collaborating with such a talented and dedicated artist.  I cannot wait to share our finished "Gaia" series with everyone soon.