Michelle Gagliano and Beatrix Ost began an artistic collaboration together in the months following the start of the Pandemic. Neither artist knew the other very well at the outset. Both artists had very different aesthetic and working styles. Ost was a narrative painter with lush, sensual iconography that bordered on surrealism, occasionally with a hedonistic flavor, or cautions about those pursuits, always rich in color and motion. Gagliano’s work focused more on abstractions of nature, glimpsing the sacred hidden in shadow and light; in undulating water and air movement; in immediate experience and distant consciousness. Each artist would paint a canvas and then give it to the other to complete. The theme that both artists shared was a reverence for bounty and fragility of the earth. The process required the abandonment of control and ego- to surrender one’s art to another’s decision and handling. The collective result is a fascinating study of works made by two separate minds and hands. The exhibition in Chroma’s Microspace is a small and exquisite sampler of the outcome of this two+ year project between these two women.