They’ve Shared Canvases for Forty Years. They Never Discuss the Work.

For decades, residents of Sullivan County’s Cochecton area knew Dean Scharf as the man behind Dog Mountain Lodge, the beloved kennel he co-founded. But before the dogs, before the boarding runs and the daily rhythms of animal care, there were canvases.

Scharf, who along with his partner Krista spent years as working artists in New York City and the Catskills, is showcasing that earlier identity this weekend. The couple’s collaborative work goes on display at the Delaware Valley Arts Alliance in Narrowsburg — a show that spans nearly forty years of a creative partnership as unusual as it is intimate.

“I hope they look at the art and they enjoy it,” Scharf said of Dog Mountain regulars who may know him only from the kennel. “What we do isn’t necessarily for everybody, but we hope that it stimulates your thinking.”

Arriving in The Catskills

Scharf first landed in Sullivan County the way a lot of artists do — fleeing the city. It was 1981, the summer of boom boxes and brutal heat, as he recalls, and his studio on 110th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan had become unbearable. He pulled out a map, drew a circle a hundred miles from the city, and followed it north. He and Krista eventually bought a barn in Cochecton to use as a painting studio.

In those early years, the cultural infrastructure that Sullivan County residents may take for granted today simply didn’t exist. “It was nothing like this back then in the 80s,” Scharf said. “Nothing.” Artists were around, he said, but largely working in isolation. To help change that, the Scharf’s acquired a former supermarket in Lake Huntington — once known as Mountain Lake Meats — converting it into a studio and exhibition space. They hosted art shows there, and concerts too, each summer season.

The Colloboartive Proccess of Making Art

The centerpiece of their new exhibition, though, is something far more personal: the collaborative process Scharf and Krista have been developing together for more than four decades.

Scharf says the idea of collaboraring originated with Krista, who proposed it to several artists — the concept of sharing a single canvas, alternating back and forth, each one free to do whatever they wished to the other’s work. Most turned her down flat. Scharf didn’t hesitate.

“I thought, ‘This is brilliant,'” he said. “It sounds really, really interesting.”

The rules are few. One person begins a painting or drawing. At some point, they hand it to the other. That person can add, subtract, or alter — “anything short of destroying it completely,” Scharf said. Then it goes back. And back again. The piece is finished when the person who receives it feels it is done.

Perhaps the most striking element of the process: they don’t discuss the work while it’s in progress. They don’t even look at it unless it has been handed to them.

What makes that kind of creative surrender possible, Scharf suggested, comes down to something simple. “We respect each other as artists and as individuals.”

Whether viewers can detect traces of the relationship itself in the work is another question. Scharf is skeptical — or at least modest about it. “I don’t think the art is about us,” he said. “I think it’s about the subject.”

Lessons Continue to Be Learned

After more than 40 years of handing canvases back and forth — accepting what comes back transformed, working without control — Scharf said the process has given him something difficult to measure.

“You have to be open to the changes that happen to what you do,” Scharf said. “I’ve learned a lot, and I’m sure Krista has learned a lot from me — just being open to what you might not have done before.”

Image: Krista and Dean Krista Scharf’s new exhibition “How Two” is on view at Delaeare Valley Arts Alliance March 21- April 26, 2026. (DVAA).