November « 2010 « Kerry Dennehy Creative Services

November 30, 2010

Presented the Grove Today

I added some new stuff, shifted my presentation around. I think it went well. I have another shot next Monday so I’m hoping it goes even better.

One of the things I added was an introduction on Brady’s philosophical concern for intentionality. I showed some of the classic illustrations and then I tried to suggest how this concept influenced his methods reading and interpretting events and narrative. I started with this drawing:

Which illustrates a part of Utnapishtim’s sleep test for Gilgamesh. Whereas today we would say, “Gilgamesh fell asleep” the text asserts that “sleep poured over his eyes like a mist.” I think both descriptions are available to us as sensations. Learning how the original readers of Gilgamesh understood sleep adds to what I can notice about sleep. Still though, sleep itself is known to us or at least something we are familiar with in our own way. I then moved onto this cartoon, dealing with another familiar subject, this time a bit metaphorically (?) and I asked the class, “And then what happens?’

November 29, 2010

Bringing the Devil

Here is a sculpture I did as part of the design for the cover of a book about writing and revision, aptly named, BRINGING THE DEVIL TO HIS KNEES. The publisher ultimately went with someone else. Likely I was being a little too literal. I made the sculpture as a armature on which to place a piece of writing showing evidence of the struggle of revision. I never got it quite as I saw it in my head, but here’s one of my attempts:

November 28, 2010

style: visual identity & equivalence

I made this post card to send to James Kochalka when his daily comic AMERICAN ELF reached the ten year mark. My image is based on a photo of Kochalka and his kids and on a somewhat famous painting by someone else.

Here’re the same elements presented as a comparison, bits of multiply reproduced (degraded) GUERNICA and grid paper atop pages from Kochalka’s THE HORRIBLE TRUTH ABOUT COMICS. This is from a series of photographs I took: videotaped collages I made while I was designing a previous version of this web site (no longer extant.)

And here again a comparison involving the GUERNICA baby: this time posed against Minnie, Vinny and some Mayan Glyphs. I appreciate glyphs, especially with regard to their foreignness. I am always looking to achieve in my drawing and writing the formal quality I appreciate most readily in markings that are illegible to me.

And finally, GUERNICA baby and some grafitti I copied from a barrier on the side of southbound Route 17, around Allendale, NJ. (Graffiti no longer extant, except in the series of photos I took. I believe this tag says or originally said, “Messiah.”)

November 26, 2010

2 pages from the 2nd grove notebook

Here’re two consecutive pages from one of my grove sketchbooks. They depict some of the last episodes in Gilgamesh. Trying to design the relief sculptures for the grove, I cartooned the whole story to see which events were most visual. I wrote slightly more on the design questions here.

November 25, 2010

No Chicken For Martha This Year

Martha (M.E.) spontaneously on the street in Rhinebeck, NY decided to collect chickens.
We immediately bought her her first one. Then for every Thanksgiving at Martha’s (and Max’s, when he was home from college –he’s in law school now) for several years I made her a chicken centerpiece out of dried flowers. The first one was dressed as a pilgrim. Pictured here is the most cartoony of my designs. The following year I took a turn to more “naturalistic” flower-based chickens.

This year we’re all in different places. I’m sure we will all have a good time but I miss all the folks from Martha’s annual party.

November 24, 2010

Snail & Turtle

One of my absolute favorite collages from one of the world’s premiere collage artists, (I will not say THE premiere collage artist, though she is certainly MY world’s premiere collage artist) Maya Poran. Her web site I’ve been assured is coming soon.

I also know the story behind this particular collage. A dear friend visiting in an effort to raise her spirits uncharacteristically told a joke:

“What did the snail riding on the turtle’s back say?”

I don’t know, what did it say?

“Wheeeeeeeeeeeee!”

Dr. Poran was so charmed by this effort that she immediately constructed this collage in thanks.

Art directors and publishers of children’s picture books take note: This is certainly the most dazzling thing you are ever going to stumble across.

November 23, 2010

Another Stereoscope: Bilby and Lynda B.

Stereoscope juxtaposing Plate XI from William Blake’s ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE BOOK OF JOB (1826) and Panel 2, page 74 from Lynda Barry’s THE FREDDIE STORIES (1999). Separated by 173 years, sharing a similar vision. I’m sure Lynda Barry has seen this image of Blake’s. Does that make her’s a copy of his? Not necessarily. Blake himself found the poses and compositions for his divine visions in reproductions of Renaissance Masterworks.

I find this likeness wonderful and marvelous. I have notes for an essay I’d like to put up as a permanent page here. For now, though, I will suggest the direction the essay would take with a quote from a book I’ve already mentioned here:

“Medieval visionary allegory offers its readers participation in a process of psychic redemption closely resembling, though wider in scope than, modern psychotherapy …

“the basic content and structural elements of such allegory consist largely of imagery derived from and constituting progressive developments of the imagery of classical and pre-classical religion and myth, as they are manifested in literature and art …

“The major poets of medieval visionary allegory regard themselves as part of a cumulative tradition, in which each allegorist recapitulates, refines and develops the thought and imagery of his [sic] predecessors, exploring new dimensions of traditional topics, and, most important, attempting to integrate earlier thought and imagery pertaining to the topic into a coherent whole …

“Allegory as a serious genre waned in the fifteenth century owing to the growing inability of allegorical poets to continue to achieve imaginative comprehension of the symbolical and mythical elements of the form. By the seventeenth century, a more strictly analytic approach to the phenomenal world made allegorizing seem intellectually trivial … ”

(from Propositions 1, 2, 8 & 9 from the introduction to Paul Piehler’s THE VISIONARY LANDSCAPE (pps 19-20)

And a last thought:

Is 173 years a long time? A bit too long, I guess, for any one of us to endure. Whatever the number of years, Blake seems irrevocably long ago, from the age of revolution, the mythical time of our era’s origin. His words, images and ideas shine through history like a dead star. He has, it seems, joined history — that flat offensive significance of human life which the living are barred from entering.

Meanwhile, Lynda Barry has such a knack for the voices of adolescence and childhood she seems to resurrect a reader’s own past. The memories she stirs live again.

That makes THE FREDDIE STORIES all the more a marvel: in it Freddie undergoes a “journey to the underworld” which employs imagery familiar from Dante’s journey, even Virgil’s journey. But she builds Freddie’s journey of ” psychic redemption” out of such recognizable, contemporary stuff that she invites us to our own inside of a visionary landscape that has floated along with people for thousands of years.

November 22, 2010

another stereoscope involving Blake’s Lifemask

Here is a comic strip I made with Blake’s Lifemask and two of Messerschmidt’s sculptures.

November 20, 2010

Two Sketches for Relief

I’m still working on a page and another post about my Mentor’s Grove project, which I designed in response to the death of my mentor. I’m writing mostly about my struggles to realize the relief sculptures. I wanted to capture the entire epic of Gilgamesh on the interior walls of the grove. These two sketches depict Gilgamesh and Enkidu dancing through their heroic adventures, dancing in the joy of their strength. You can see pictured the killing of both Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven.

But these things are pictured, depicted, rather than narrated through the pictures. The pictures require captions. My hope had been that the pictures would replace — stand in the place of — the master storyteller who had been lost. It took me a long time to realize that this task was impossible. Like so many other parts of this experience, my own story reflected the story I was attempting to retell. Wasn’t Gilgamesh forced to the same conclusion at the end of his long journey to resurrect his friend?

November 19, 2010

When Worlds Collage

This is a collage in white grease pencil (china marker) of drawings I copied from Lynda Barry and Robert Fludd. I chose Fludd’s drawing, which I saw for the first time on the front of a book catalog, because it uses the phrase “mundus imaginabilis.” I mistook his drawing as a diagram of Sufi mystic experience which I had just been reading about in books by Henry Corbin. It turns out that Fludd’s ideas were a bit different but by the time I found that out, the drawing had been made. I combined the drawing of the mundus imaginabilis (which now that I think of it may be the mundus imaginalis in Corbin) with drawings from Lynda Barry because it suited my abiding interest in the difference in accounts of visionary experience in different periods of history.

The Lynda Barry drawings I took from her 100 DEMONS, one of the most enjoyable books I have ever read. These panels come from the introduction where she describes the writing exercise which gave rise to the book (and the title of the book): intending nothing, leaving her brush free to record her every stray thought, she captures the demons that enter her mind. If you haven’t read 100 Demons, I’m not sure what you’ve been doing. You must read this book.

I did this drawing initially as a card for my friend Avy’s 30th birthday. I liked it so much that I made three prints of it, giving one to Avy, one to my friend Kat, and one to someone else (OF).

I post this drawing today because I spoke to Kat on the phone and because today, after years of waiting, I received my copy of Lynda Barry’s latest, THE NEAR SIGHTED MONKEY BOOK. Years ago, I put my name on a list so that I could have it as soon as it was available but its publication was repeatedly delayed. I kept getting little e-mails from Amazon saying, “Sorry, not yet” and “oop wait a second.” So the book finally arrives — with $7.50 due COD — and Kat tells me Kyle bought the book for her a week ago from the bookstore!

Kat and I spent the rest of our conversation talking about writer’s block, ways of breaking it and how Lynda Barry is the coolest. Always good to talk to you, Kat.

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