November « 2010 « Kerry Dennehy Creative Services

November 18, 2010

To Stay Near the Wellspring

Commenting on my post, “My Most Enduring Collaborations” Nick Mullins said, “Looking through artists’ websites, I sometimes see a thumbnail that looks really interesting, but when I click on it to get the full-sized image, I find that the real image is nothing like what I thought I was seeing in the thumbnail. Sometimes I have gone back and tried to do a sketch from what I thought I saw in the thumbnail. Your discussion of the fish that became a man in a tarp reminded me of that. Sometimes an accident of vision is more interesting than the reality.”

(Here’s an elaboration of what I replied to him:) Yes my efforts have always included either accident or collaboration — you get to new places faster. Plus, employing accidents it’s easier to appreciate what others might see in my work. It’s only in recent years that I’ve realized that what I simply straight-forwardly produce is a new place to a person seeing it for the first time. It was the most obvious thing but it hit me like a thunderbolt.

But generally I like to think that the accident or other kind of unexpected input points us to a reality we wouldn’t have conceived of without it. I don’t mean that in any mystical way. I mean in just the same way a new sound of music will direct our attention to or express a mood we’ve never heard expressed before. Novelty and re-cognition are wrapped up together. Our ability to invent ways to express our experience, to share our experience, always lags behind experience itself. When someone finds a way to say something new about something true, its like a gift we already possess.

I totally get the thumbnail experience. Very often I screen capture a thumbnail at the resolution I like it and then blow it up in photoshop. The resolution might be fuzzy but most times it retains the thing I saw in it.

It’s true of my own work. I like to work really small: I tend to make less marks and their interrelations are clearer. Then when I blow it up — used to be on xerox machines or cameras, now it’s scanners mostly — I work to catch the rhythms evident in the little one. Yeah, without projectors, cameras, etc., most of my work would be postage stamp sized.

Speaking of stamp-sized:

The first image in this post, which I’ve just renamed “At the Waterfall” is based on this one here. This one is reproduced at it’s original size. I got the larger image from this small source by a kind of divination. I used to use this process all the time. It combines the two things we just talked about: seeing things in small things and seeing things accidentally. The larger image is a painting mind you: I started with a penciled-in grid and painted all those little dots myself. So there. The smaller image is from a photo from a black and white newspaper which I hand-colored and amended with pen. It is hard to tell now but the original photo was of a boy staring at the camera from behind a fence. The fragment I used shows (or used to show) his fingers poking through chain links in the fence.

Time to Present

These three images are from the archive of my Mentor’s Grove Project.

They represent two distinct efforts at design of the relief sculptures. I like how different they appear. I have learned a great deal thinking about that difference and still have a lot left to learn.

The relief sculptures were to surround the visitor once they had reached the center of the labyrinth. The two distinct design processes can be related to one another once you know the conception of the reliefs: the whole story of Gilgamesh was to emerge from the walls like the images seen in clouds.

Imagine that: lying on your back, gazing into the sky and, instead of picking out a duck or a snowman in an individual cloud, you see surrounding you over the whole horizon, linked cloud by cloud, an entire coherent epic story. This was intended as a metaphor for the naturalness of human life as story. That is, to suggest the way human life relates to the rest of nature.

(But think what changes the world would have to undergo to witness such a spectacle. How is human life like and unlike that? That question was central to my process)

But, two efforts: 1. To tell the whole story of Gilgamesh and 2. to tell it in sculptures that appear in the same way that images appear in clouds.

First the cartoony sketch — I have, over two sketchbooks, the entire epic of Gilgamesh messily sketched out as sequential art, in an effort to see what was visible (most visual) about the events narrated in the story.

Second, these ambiguous photographs: My idea for the visual look of the reliefs was like “images seen in clouds” — except seen in stone, fieldstone and mortar. I wanted viewers to see the sculptures the same way they see images in natural formations, clouds, rocks, trees. I wanted the images to be invisible until viewers pulled them out of the undeclarative surface with their imaginations.

I have hundreds of photographs of rockfaces and treebranches — particularly oaks for some reason — which I took in an effort to learn the style by which natural forms suggested images. The photographs here relate to a later stage in that process: trying to catch the repetition and interruption of such forms, I incised a grid into a piece of plastic and then photographed images reflected in its divided surface.

Included in the computer slide show of images I reflected were pictures from Ankor Wat. The Kmer sculpture and architecture from Ankor Wat has always struck me as a sort of hallucination occuring in our perception of natural forms. It is far more visible and declarative than the sculpture I intended for the grove but still I like it.

November 17, 2010

a study for a relief sculpture

I’ve been thinking about my Mentor’s Grove project today. I’m in the process of writing a page about it to post here. The Grove was a very ambitious sculptural-setting I designed (but was unable to sell) in honor of my mentor, Ron Brady, who died suddenly in 2003. It was/is a very rich piece but in brief it was an experiential sculpture, half labyrinth, half outdoor classroom. The student’s experience of the sculpture began as navigating a maze that then opened into a quiet interior space — a grove — where the journey just taken was depicted in relief on the walls. The whole piece was intended as an invitation to other professors to take on the full role of mentor (conveyor of life wisdom).

The main motif was the grove in the underworld where heroes in stories travel in times of trouble. There they meet a wise soul who helps them untangle their difficulties. My mentor’s mentor, Paul Piehler, wrote a book on this traditional literary occurence. The book was called The Visionary Landscape. I used the specific imagery of the journey to the other world from the Epic Of Gilgamesh because that was the subject of the most stunning lecture I ever saw Brady give.

The picture above was an an early concept sketch I did of one of the planned reliefs. It was to represent the moment in Gilgamesh when Enkidu realizes he is a human being: his identity (here represented by his face) contracts from the rest of nature.

November 16, 2010

Paper and Burlap Sculpture, detail.

One of seven heads cast in paper pulp from a soft water-soluable mold. The heads were later attached to bodies and along with a “creche” structure were embedded in a hillside for a show in Up-State New York. My friend the artist Jackie Skrzyinski invited me to participate in the show which she co-curated with Robert Modafferi.

November 14, 2010

My Most Enduring Collaboration

This is a photograph of a video. I took video of a collage executed in 1998 by Maya Poran. Though untitled, I call the collage “Maya’s Vase” because it was executed over the entire surface of a terra cotta pot. I was so taken with the design that I video-taped it (this is the late nineties) and then, watching the tape in a darkened room and fiddling with the various “dials” on the “television” I photographed the images on screen. Or rather I photographed the phantoms I saw in the collage. I then chose some of the photographs to use as reference material for a series of paintings. I exhibited the paintings in a show at Noah’s Underground Gallery in Ann Arbor in early 2000. The show was called, “Images From Maya’s Vase.”

The above from-video photograph was used as reference for a painting called “The Ark’s Abandoned.” The colorful drapery-seeming thing at the top center of the image I took to be the Biblical ark. To the front of it on the right, in the rising flood waters a man shelters himself with a tarp. Between the man and the ark, drowned or low-flying birds.

Though in the Bible’s account the ark is painted with bitumen-pitch-asphalt (?) I treated the designs on the ark’s drapery like calligraphy and quoted chapter and verse the saddest line in the whole Noah story (Gen. 6:6) I wrote it without vowels, as was the fashion:

One of the things I liked most about Maya’s Vase was that it collaged different kinds of figuration, as seen above: a photo-centric (what the camera could record) depiction of water is overlaid with a conventional line drawing of waves. In other places conventional crescent moons hung over naturalistic twilight gatherings, the geometrical stars and stripes of an American Flag transformed into the gossamerest gossamer of angel’s wings. The angel herself seen in the conventional way, as a nude human being with wings, had the most naked, human of flesh, livid and goose-pimpled.

This is a straight-forward photograph of the portion of the collage seen altered by video above. Just a detail of it, not the whole, and turned on it’s side so that you can see that the image of the man covering himself with the tarp arose, ironically enough, from the drawing of a fish.

A pen and ink study of the man who used to be a fish. And a second study, painted in soupy acrylics:Here the fish is oriented as it was in the original and in the video so that you can better compare it to the man.

To show a little more how generative this process of video-taping and photographing Maya’s collaged elements was, here is another example. It is the same section of the collage as above, this time photographed as reference for a different painting, this one entitled: “None of the Sentinels Know.” (Actually I just changed the title here. This version is close enough and has a more natural ring than the original title.) Here again are the fish and the birds and the drapery. But now I see two sentinels standing watch in front of a typical death’s head.

This is ten years ago and more. My art practices have changed. Up until 2000 many of my paintings took shape in a way similar to the “images from Maya’s Vase.” At the time, I searched for compositions by a kind of divination. I was always photographing videos or video-taping photographs, zooming in, raising the contrast. There was a Rorshach-y Ink-blotty quality to my discoveries. My mind made sense where there was none. It was very much like bumping into a dream image. I found the process bracing and cleansing. Today, the vase is still on display in our “play room.” I value it most of the objects from that time. The photographs I value next. Now though, I value them for their surface qualities, the strange harmonies of the colors, still this mix of the conventional and the naturalistic, the atmospheric effects. These surface qualities demand no explanation, and communicate a charge of meaning as powerful to any viewer as my original interpretations were to me alone.

another stereoscopic image

Here is the possibility of seeing William Blake’s life mask in three dimensions without being in its actual presence. I constructed this stereo-image by screen-grabbing two images from a video featuring the mask. The video camera was moving just enough during the shot to provide these two aspects. The two slightly different aspects simulate views from two different eyes. The video is for Patti Smith’s cover of “Smells like Teen Spirit.”

November 12, 2010

stereoscopic image

November 11, 2010

SR’s Vision: Corner of Bowery and Broom

At a wedding, this is years and years ago, SR introduced himself to me. He said he was a friend of the groom, that he had heard I was an artist and that he was looking for an artist to paint a vision he’d had. I said he was in luck because I had just come off of years studying visionary art — how as a tradition it had evolved over time. I’d struggled to understand the relation between real visions, historically specific interpretations and the individual creativity of artists. SR told me his story. He was a Jewish guy who had always loved and honored his traditions. In recent years he had been travelling on business to Asia. He’d fallen in love with the cultures of China and Japan. This love was challenging everything, opening everything up to question. At the time I met him he was learning to speak Mandarin in Manhattan’s Chinatown. One day he was waiting to cross the street after class when, amid slow traffic, a bus of Hasidim slowly rolled passed. As the bus went by he realized that the Hasidim would not recognize their kinship to him as immediately as he had recognized his kinship to them. This, he said, was his vision. He didn’t go out of his way to elaborate. He simply described it as a moment of focus. At that instant, all of the elements of his current in-between identity had been visually present in his physical environment. He spoke of it with an unself-conscious enthusiasm convincing me not only that something had indeed occurred to him but that he had found within himself the kind of psychic grace necessary to balance such an experience with our default notions of the nature of reality in the modern world.

After hearing his story I really wanted to work with him. He sent me photos of the area in Chinatown where the vision had occurred. Unsatisfied, I eventually visited the corner myself. My friend Ivan drove me around the block several times as I took still more photos. I remember being really struck by the difference between what I’d been able to get from SR’s photos and what I got being on site. “It’s so 3D!” I said. I remember Ivan replied, “That’s because it is 3D,” and then said something about how maybe I might want to set up an easel across the street and “paint from life.” “Not for the money I’m asking,” I said.

SR visited me a few times and posed for me. This is actually quite a good likeness of SR, somewhere between 1995 and 1999. It was the hardest work I’ve ever done to accurately portray someone’s appearance. SR himself pointed out quite readily that his face and features were curiously asymmetrical. Indeed they were, nothing seemed to go off in the right direction. This asymmetry, combined with the odd angle of the pose, made catching his image intensely difficult. The more I drew from what I knew of faces, the less it looked like him. The more I caught his likeness the less believable the image was. I struggled and struggled to get the lines and angles just right. And then suddenly, there he was.

I had imagined that a person looking to commemorate such an experience would be very careful about choosing the artist who would take charge of such a task so I was aggressive in pursuing the commission. I sent him a portfolio of my work on a series of twelve post cards over twelve consecutive days. The post cards opened up and inside were essays detailing my studies of religious visions through the ages. Some of these essays were over ten pages long. When the twelve days were accomplished he gave me the impression that it all had been unnecessary, that he had been satisfied with me at our first meeting. We worked together for a few months, as I said he came to visit me and pose. I sent him sketches such as the ones pictured above. We could never settle the issue of my compensation and so the project was left uncompleted.

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