The Antipodes Project is a collaborative surreal drawing project that, so far, 37 artists from worldwide have contributed to. The project began in 2006 when Ben Tolman, Washington DC based artist and artist Lars Peterson began to work on a large multi panel pen drawing, which they later entitled "Novus Natura". As this drawing came to fruition, Ben thought it would be cool to do some more collaborative drawings and invite other artists to participate. This idea of collaborative drawing was not new, by any mean, especially in the surreal community. An early model of this was the Exquisite Corpse collaborations done by surrealists in the early 1900's. Fast forward to the modern world and the Internet, and suddenly cool collaborations were popping up everywhere. In May of 2005, Deborah Valentine and others started an online surreal club called "The Exquisite Corpse" on the Deviant Art website for the express purpose of bringing together artists to create collaborative works of art. Artists, including Ben Tolman, Bernard Dumaine, and myself, along with many others, created collaborative drawings together. In fact, in 2006, I finished up a collaboration through the club with Ben, which we called "Three Muses". I had done several by then, with other artists, but I did not like the restrictions of the club that required that work done by one artist be covered except for a small strip. The collaboration part was great however. In fact, I enjoyed this so much that I decided to do one with my self by using nine pieces of 11 X 14 inch Bristol paper, which I would later present together as one large drawing. I started this drawing in 2005, using a fine tipped Koh-i-Noor Rapidograph pen, and finally finished the panels around New Years of 2008, and I called it "Nine Panes of Thought" or sometimes "Self Searching". Of course, others were doing similar collaborative drawings all around the world. However; what made the Antipodes Project unique was the number of artists involved. Starting with only two artists and growing to 37, and still growing!

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Basically, we work with 005 micron pens on 11 X 14 in pieces of Bristol paper to create super detailed weirdness! The panels are put together to create large pieces. Many very talented artists from around the world are working with together on the project, and we are still looking for more artists to contribute.

So far, the following artists have contributed something to three finished projects and on more in progress: Ben Tolman, Joe A. MacGown, Joseph H. MacGown, Julianne MacGown, Chloe Marsters, Marnie Pitts, Otto Rapp, Paulo Cunha, Pizo Meyer, Ryan Thornburg, Zachary Nolin, Reinhard Schmid, Cayung Siagan, Kris Kuksi, Maura Holden, Jon Beinart, Kuba Ambrose, Gill Perry, Rodney Gee, Phil Rubinov Jacobson, Yainseridoo, Durga, Sal Hunter, Rens Ink, David Mack, Greg Kanteres, Rick Bach, Theo Ellsworth, Marcel Bakker, Alexander Bostic, and Deborah Valentine.

I was mostly involved with the third project and to a lesser degree the fourth project. On the third Project, which I called "Kilroy Was Here", I did at least half of the work with my pen being using somewhere on every panel, and 16 other artists contributed, some doing only a little, and others doing a good bit. Ben also did a huge amount of work on this one, and Ryan, Paulo, Joseph, and Otto were among the few were had art on more than a single panel.