3 the Hard Way

Last night I attended a screening of the documentary “3 the Hard Way”. The movie was filmed and directed by my friend Robert King. Lisa King did the behind the scenes photography. The story documents a project by Raleigh Artists Sean Kernick, Paul Friederich and Georges LeChevallier – the three artists each began with two or three surfaces and each created a piece of art before exchanging the work with the other two artists who subsequently added their own creative elements to the artwork.

While this is not a groundbreaking idea as far as art projects there are few things that made this exceptional. Robert did an amazing job in the production of the film. There was an element of intrigue of what the finished works would look like – this coupled with brilliant cinematography made an entertaining documentary that even kept my 9 and 7 year old sons interested.

The other stand out aspect of this project and film was the cohesion and uniqueness of the artists. Whenever a project like this starts there is always a concern that the artistic styles will be too similar or too different. I did a project as a kid where the teacher asked students to partner up – one student would paint one half of a subject the other student the other half. The problem was that each student had been instructed the same methods of painting by the teacher so the end results were pretty dull since they looked too similar. Conversely if we had a time machine and asked Andy Warhol to collaborate with Johannes Vermeer on a project it might be interesting but very lacking in cohesion. The styles of artists in this film are different enough to be anything but boring, yet not so far out there that the finished works lacked any continuity from one artist to the next.

The pictures shown are a few of the finished pieces by the artists. These are the result of a cartoonist, a graffiti artist and a mixed media painter. Well done guys!