Colorado Springs oil painter Brett Andrus is hard at work on the seven deadly sins.

Specifically, greed and gluttony.

No, not in his daily life, though he does cop to logging gluttonous 16-hour workdays, but on canvas for a new exhibit, “SIN,” which pairs seven photographers with six oil painters. Each duo will collaborate to depict one of the deadly sins — the others are lust, wrath, sloth, pride, envy — in paintings and photos. (One painter had to drop out, so Andrus will sin twice.) Sometimes the painting will match the photos, sometimes it won’t. The artists were given carte blanche to approach the project however they decided.

The show features artists from around the Pikes Peak region, Denver, Santa Fe, and Salt Lake City, including Lauren McKenzie, Phil Lear, Claire Swinford, Elizabeth Selby, Matt Chmielarczyk, Grace Gatto, Dorielle Caimi and Nicole Beck.

“As a studio artist, the normal way of art is sitting in your studio by yourself making art,” said Andrus, who owns Bosky Studio (formerly S.P.Q.R.). “It’s one of the few art forms that we do that. In music, we make music as a group. In dance, we perform as a group. In acting, we do it as a group. It’s a collaborative experience in most artmaking other than visual art. It’s always been a fun experiment to get visual artists to come together and make a thing. They either hate it or enjoy it or find ways of making it work.”

Perched on Andrus’ canvas inside the gallery he’s owned in the downtown Arts Alley for 17 years is an eye-catching, luminous homage to gluttony. Two women, who wear powdered Marie Antoinette-like wigs and lingerie, lounge against each other inside a white clawfoot tub in a bright white bathroom, surrounded by pretty pastel cakes and salamanders, and gaze up at the viewer.

Taped to the wall behind the easel is his photo reference, culled from a photo shoot with McKenzie, his exhibit partner, in a home in the Old North End of the Springs.

“We started with the bigger picture — where do we want to set the story and what is the emotional thing we want to give people when they look at the piece,” Andrus said. “How do we back ourselves into that? We were both drawn to Marie Antoinette’s ‘let them eat cake.’ There’s a political climate around it now, too. We’re living in a world of gluttonous behavior.”

Before landing on the show’s theme Andrus and a few of the participating artists brainstormed the idea of sin: “It’s a religious construct but also a societal construct,” Andrus said. “We agree to avoid these things to make sure we don’t destroy each other.”

And they wondered if any new sins have emerged through the centuries.

“We were going to do ancient sins and modern sins — what would be a modern sin?” Andrus said.

“We were getting into the idea of social media. Oh, that’s just pride, it’s already an ancient sin. Oh, it’s gluttony. There’s not really a new sin. We might give it a new name but it falls into the same categories.”

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