Kerry Dennehy Creative Services

December 5, 2010

Mural Workshop: Composition & Pattern

I developed this exercise to demonstrate how complex pretty patterns can be built up out of simple shapes. I start talking about composition and mural design with simple ideas about pattern, repetition, positive and negative space, trying to get participants to see the graphic effect of what they are producing. I developed this exercise out of my love for kolam drawings. For the simple elements I went to my favorite drawing by a four year old. Below is a drawing by Nick (now probably 14) who was obsessed with King Arthur and Knights. I love that castle and horse. I think a t-shirt with that castle and horse on it would be great.

Besides the horse and the castle, Nick has pictured a knight with a sword and a feather in his helmet, and some other items I’m not sure what they are. A half eaten apple? An umbrella? A gift box? Actually I think the gift box is actually a sword in a scabbard. That scabbard image repeated in a radial pattern makes the star at the center of the drawing I produced. For the pattern demo I chose seven elements from Nick’s drawing, including the feather and a pocket in the knight’s armor that looks just like a comma. To those I added the larger organizing elements of concentric squares and circles.

Below is what I produced. About a third of it was freehand: it turned out it was speedier than Photoshop. But for things like Nick’s horse I had to share the original, so I cut and pasted. Participants were then given the organizing rings of circles and squares and asked to fill them in with the simple shapes like hearts, stars, diamonds, dollar signs etc., which were listed on the survey they took as designs people at the drop-in center would like to see in the mural.

December 1, 2010

One Day In The Maze…

… The Rat ran into The Minotaur.

This cartoon came to me while I was working on a film for a general illustration class. The assignment was to make a film meditating on the relation between place and character. What I came up with I called, “A film on location.” Funny, right?

Hi Kenya! Write me a comment when you see this!

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.

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