Esteemed Alabama artist celebrated in new book

By Susan Swagler

It's sometimes hard to be mindful. To be in the moment more often than not. Dale Kennington's paintings remind us of what that effort is worth. Her works of contemporary American realism draw from the very essence of everyday life--the in-between moments we so often overlook. A new book from The University of Alabama Press, "Grandeur of the Everyday: The Paintings of Dale Kennington," celebrates Kennington's view of commonplace, familiar subjects with 85 images of her vibrant, beautiful easel paintings on canvas and her freestanding, wooden folding screens.

Even with a focus on the ordinary, her paintings offer a bigger picture of the extraordinary life Kennington lived. With this issue's emphasis on women, I think it's fitting to feature this woman--an Alabama artist who created beautiful art for others while, at the same time, making a name and a place for herself in this world.

Kennington, who lived in Dothan most of her life, described her art as "merged memories." And indeed she did combine photography, memory, and imagination to create paintings that mix contemporary elements with magical realism. Many of her paintings are in private collections; others hang in notable museums and public spaces around the world. Here in Birmingham, her art can be found at Children's of Alabama, the Birmingham Museum of Art, and the Federal Reserve Bank. They also can be found in museums in Huntsville, Montgomery, Dothan, and Mobile, as well as the United States Embassy in Paris and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in D.C. Her work is in the personal collection of King Carl Gustaf XVI of Sweden. She was selected to represent our state as an ambassador for the arts in Italy.

Kennington's path to this acclaim was lifelong. In art historian Daniel White's introduction to this book, he shares that, as a child, Kennington papered her room--and even her closet--with her art. At the time she attended Huntingdon College, majors for women were limited to nursing, teaching, home economics, and art. Kensington chose art. She later transferred to The University of Alabama and graduated with a degree in art history and design.

She began painting in earnest while raising her family in Dothan. She found she was "bored to tears" by social clubs and bridge games and knew there was a better way to fill her free time. She asked all the mothers in her neighborhood to bring their children over to sit for a portrait. White writes: "This was not done out of joyful charity, it was to bring her painting skills back to the level she knew they needed to be." Soon she had commissions from people in town and out of town. White says she followed this strict schedule: "paint one child per month, completing 12 portraits in a year, all from sitting, no photography. Although it created more work for her, she had more confidence in the observation process, and could more accurately record the personality of the child from direct sittings."

Fifteen years later, as Kennington painted the last of these child portraits, she continued to rely upon local subjects for her art--people in barbershops, bars and restaurants, on subways, at gospel concerts, and in motel rooms and even nursing homes. She no longer confined her work to sittings though. She bought a camera and went out in the world to take photos of what interested her and what she thought might make a good painting. The photos became the basis for sketches. At a time well before Photoshop, Kennington incorporated elements from multiple photos into one painting. She said she always distorted the faces in her paintings so that "they become someone other than the person in the original photograph." Even so, people sometimes came to gallery openings declaring they were the person in a painting--even if they lived in another state and Kennington had never laid eyes on them.

The paintings depicted on the pages of this book are treasures--so are the personal narratives included here. A Q&A between Kennington, who died in May of this year, and Kristen Miller Zohn is especially enlightening regarding how Kennington "built" her paintings and titled her works. She talked about how seeing a folding screen on display at the New Orleans Museum of Art led her into an entirely new creative direction. A series of screen paintings took her mind off the loss of her husband. Sort of. "I did not realize it at the time," she told Zohn, "but looking back, I see that death was a theme throughout the whole series."

In her artist statement for this book, Kennington said: "What I'm striving for when I paint is a feeling. Is the painting happy looking or sad? ... Are the people fresh or tired looking? Are their lives complicated or running smoothly? These things are what give 'the story' to the painting. I almost never get the same story when viewers are telling me about their interpretation of the work. My paintings require both the artist and the viewer. I cannot fulfill both positions."

One thing is certain: Kennington's story of a woman who created her own path is worth contemplating. This book--filled with images of her life's work--is a lovely way to do that.

Thinking About Gift Giving

Fiction, history, and poetry (a couple here you can bundle!) make the perfect gift.

The Floating World by C. Morgan Babst (Algonquin Books)

Goodness knows we've seen history-making hurricanes this year, but Hurricane Katrina always will be a touchstone event. This debut novel, by a New Orleans native, though fictional, is the Katrina story that still needs to be told. The Boisdores are a Creole family whose roots stretch back almost to the founding of New Orleans. This story of class and race is told from the point of view of several family members. When the storm approaches, Joe Boisdores, an artist who is descended from freed slaves, and his white "Uptown" wife, Dr. Tess Eshleman, flee, but their elder daughter, Cora, refuses to go. What happens next leaves their marriage in shambles and Cora catatonic. Something mysterious and violent happened to Cora, but she can't remember if she's the victim or the perpetrator. Cora's sister, Del, comes back home from New York City to find New Orleans and her family in ruins. As she tries to understand what happened to Cora during the storm, she also has to come to terms with the history of her city and its legacy of forgotten residents. New Orleans is a beautiful and complicated place. It always has been, and the storm magnified that in many ways. The author says that after Hurricane Katrina, "if you were blind, suddenly you saw."

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Odd Child Out by Gilly Macmillan (William Morrow)
Gilly Macmillan's fans will recognize several of the characters in "Odd Child Out" because they first met them in her debut novel, "What She Knew." The first novel explored a mother's desperate search for her missing son. It was a search that paralleled an intense, but at times, hapless, police investigation. All efforts were hampered by social media scrutiny, and there were lots of victims by the end of that story. In "Odd Child Out," another taut psychological thriller, detective Jim Clemo is on a case involving a young man named Noah Sadler who is found floating unconscious in a canal. Noah and Abdi Mahad have been inseparable friends for years--their otherness perhaps being what holds them together. Noah has battled cancer for most of his young life. Abdi is a refugee from Somalia. Abdi knows what happened to Noah (or thinks he does), but he's not talking. The longer he stays silent, the more intense the media (and social media) coverage becomes. Life is getting dangerous for Abdi, as his family and Noah's both fight for the truth, and none of this is making Detective Clemo's job any easier.

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Alabama: The Making of an American State by Edwin C. Bridges (The University of Alabama Press)

Edwin Bridges, the director emeritus of the Alabama Department of Archives and History, tells the history of our state--its people, places, and events--with a richly-illustrated tour of Alabama from its infancy to modern day, from small town to big city, from Cheaha Mountain to the Gulf Coast. This is the story of Creek warriors, slaves and their descendants, inventors and entrepreneurs, cotton mill workers, auto makers, politicians, rocket scientists, educators, builders, civil rights heroes, and many more. Bridges once gave a tour of the Alabama Archives to celebrated scientist and Alabamian E.O. Wilson who asked him if he thought "Alabama's history might actually be as powerful an epic as those of Greece and Rome." Bridges knew that our state's history is extraordinary, but, he says: "Dr. Wilson's query helped me realize that the stories I found so rich might appeal to people who are not history buffs. We might not have Socrates or Caesar, but, as a whole, our story really is a drama of epic proportions." What's more, our state's history is the history of our country--from the Stone Age to the Space Age. "And on more than a few occasions," Bridges writes, "events in Alabama helped shape the course of American history."

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milk and honey & the sun and her flowers by Rupi Kaur (Andrews McMeel Publishing)
Kaur's "milk and honey" is wildly popular. A New York Times international bestseller, more than two million copies of the poetry collection have sold in the past two years. The book had an excellent head start; Kaur has a huge social media following, and she self-published "milk and honey" in 2014 before McMeel acquired the book and republished it. Kaur's themes include love and loss, trauma and healing, with elements of femininity woven throughout. Her highly anticipated second collection of poems and humble line drawings, "the sun and her flowers," was released in October. Divided into five chapters, readers will find verse on wilting, falling, rooting, rising, and blooming; this translates into themes of growth and healing, honoring ancestors, and finding a home within yourself. To be sure though, some of the themes Kaur tackles are tough--violence, rape, alcoholism. But in this collection, like the other, the poems are extremely accessible, always thoughtful, and beautiful in simple and elegant ways.

This story appears in Birmingham magazine's November 2017 issue. Subscribe today!

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