art as culture « Kerry Dennehy Creative Services

December 12, 2010

Another Positive Sunday Workshop

The Leaders of the Future at Project WOW! worked for two hours turning their silhouettes of Ball Categories into dynamic wall decorations for the mural. These will eventually share wall space with a special iconography they are developing and some sort of (possibly verbal) history of Project Wow!

We also started to talk about experimenting with colors in relation to the success of designs. Here’s a demo I worked up before the workshop. Weeks ago, after watching SENSOLOGY by Michel Gagne and MIGRATIONS by Alyssa Sherwood, participants tried to visually evoke beats they like. The first mural we are doing is for the drop-in center’s entry way and they are trying to create a welcome. Bashir — where are you Bashir? — said after watching the films that she’d like to try to use the techniques we saw to catch the spirit she feels upon entering Project WOW!: “Pump the Beat!”

These first drawings were experimental and didn’t generate too much enthusiasm. I played with a bit of this one by Midget (self-styled) to show how playing with colors, borders and ground colors could bring out what was potential in first efforts.

December 8, 2010

Collage Coloring Page

“The deeper the influence of the formal, decorative element upon the method of representation, the more probable it becomes that formal elements attain an emotional value. An association between these two forms of art is established which leads, on the one hand to the conventionalization of representative design, on the other to the imputation of significance into formal elements. It is quite arbitrary to assume a one-sided development from the representative to the formal or vice versa, or even to speak of a gradual transformation of a representative form into a conventional one, because the artistic presentation itself can proceed only on the basis of the technically developed forms…”

— Franz Boas, “Representative Art,” pps. 82-83 Primitive Art (1927)

December 6, 2010

Best Grove Presentation So Far: 2003/4-10

So I presented my Mentor’s Grove Project to Dr. Kay Fowler’s Death and Dying class (thank you, Kay!) for the second and last time for the fall semester of 2010. It was the first time I got spontaneous applause! Twice! I rearranged my presentation from last week, starting this time with a concrete description of the actual project and then moving into the “why this is so meaningful” part of the talk. Much more sensible order.

It wasn’t perfect but I liked how it went. I introduced the project as a use of art and image making as, for lack of a more compelling phrase, one way to suffer grief as a process.

I talked about a danger of working with images and meaningful objects: Forgetting the significant way of looking at them or telling the wrong stories about them when presenting them. (Ask me about the swimming with dolphins story I told at one of Brady’s memorial services. Perfect example. But I don’t want to spend all night on the computer.) But of course there is a virtue hiding there, the possibility of the process: images unfold, their meanings dance with you as you go through the steps, as you twist and turn, wriggling to get free. What seemed like a perfectly sensible, perfectly satisfying, permanently settled understanding can explode into whole new vistas simply by asking a different question of the image. The images wait through our ignorance and persist through the changes that allow us to see them more fully.

The picture above is a two page spread from a notebook from 2006. It’s a bit outdated and definitely from a time when I was asking the images the wrong questions (or at least less developed questions than I have now) Still I like the way the sequence of views(participations) the grove presents are represented by these six illustrations. And my cartoon of the scorpion people from The Epic Of Gilgamesh may just be one of my favorite drawings ever.

Tonight I finished with the idea of the image not as an illusion or a depiction but the image as a part of nature, a remarkably human part of nature. I will continue to develop that part of the talk though who knows where my thinking will be next semester.

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 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 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?

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