Artist Amber Kempthorn’s delightful animation of Benjamin Britten’s “Sea Interludes” on view at Bonfoey, following Akron Symphony premiere

by Steve Litt

CLEVELAND, Ohio — It’s no secret that generations of children first learned to love classical music while watching animated cartoons that use famous works by great composers as their soundtrack.

Prime examples include Walt Disney’s 1940 masterpiece, “Fantasia,’’ in which lava-spewing volcanoes erupt in sync with Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,’’ and bucket-wielding brooms terrorize Mickey Mouse in a rendition of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’' by Paul Dukas.

On the more hilarious end of the spectrum are the Chuck Jones Looney Tunes cartoons, including the unforgettable Bugs Bunny episode in which Elmer Fudd sings “Kill da Wabbit!’’ to Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.”

Inspired by such examples, the mid-career Hiram-based artist Amber Kempthorn, a 2022 winner of the Cleveland Arts Prize who teaches at the College of Wooster and the Cleveland Institute of Art, set herself a huge challenge in 2019.

Even though she had never made an animation, she decided to create a 16-minute animated film using hand-drawn and computer-generated imagery to weave a visual narrative around the “Four Sea Interludes” from the 1945 Benjamin Britten opera, “Peter Grimes.’’

The premiere

The delightful result premiered Saturday, Oct. 15 at E.J. Thomas Hall in Akron in a projection of the film accompanied by a live performance of the Britten composition by the Akron Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Music Director Christopher Wilkins.

Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony anchored the evening, which also included a performance of “Rockwell Reflections’' by Florida-based composer Stella Sung, accompanied by projected images of works by Norman Rockwell.

Meanwhile, Bonfoey Gallery at 1710 Euclid Ave. in Cleveland is hosting an exhibition on view through Saturday, Nov. 5, that focuses on scores of drawings, or cels, that Kempthorn made to create her animation.

Stills from Amber Kempthorn's animation of Benjamin Britten's "Four Sea Interludes,'' which she interprets as a Sunday in the Cuyahoga Valley. Courtesy Amber Kempthorn.

Following the Akron Symphony premiere, Bonfoey will display the complete 16-minute animation, Kempthorn said in an interview with Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer.

The entire video may also be seen by clicking on this link.

Troubled at sea

“Peter Grimes’' is loosely based on a poem by the 18th-century English poet George Crabbe about a cruel fisherman suspected of wrongdoing after three of his apprentices die in succession under mysterious circumstances.

In Britten’s version, Grimes is persecuted by seaside villagers and driven to madness and suicide over the death of one apprentice at sea, and of a second on land.

The “Interludes,” including “Dawn,’’ “Sunday Morning,’’ “Moonlight,’’ and “Storm,’’ are among the most beautiful compositions of the 20th century, evoking seascapes that range from the limpid calm of a sunrise to the terror of a raging gale.

Kempthorn said she’ll never forget the first time she heard a recording of “Moonlight,’’ in which the strings establish a somber, gently throbbing motif that oscillates between peaceful repose and ominous unease.

“I found that piece of music to be so fantastically moving,’’ she said. In her mind’s eye, she said she saw images that included “this moon swaying in the sky, going under water.’’ She immediately thought of making an animation, but said, “I didn’t have the skills,’’ so the idea “sat for 10 years.’’

Stills from Amber Kempthorn's animation of Benjamin Britten's "Four Sea Interludes,'' which she interprets as a Sunday in the Cuyahoga Valley. Courtesy Amber Kempthorn.

Kempthorn ultimately felt spurred to realize her vision in 2019 in response to the Knight Arts Challenge Akron, in which artists compete for a matching grant to undertake a creative initiative about the arts that takes place in or benefits Akron.

Kempthorn dashed off a 150-word summary of her concept, which she eventually developed into an exhaustive, step-by-step plan that included an agreement with the Akron Symphony Orchestra to premiere the finished work.

Winning the $54,000 grant was just the first step. While creating her film and teaching full-time during the COVID pandemic, Kempthorn also had to raise an additional $54,000 from sources that eventually included other Northeast Ohio foundations, private donors, and family members.

Kempthorn used part of the money to engage the Red Point Digital production studio in Akron to help her figure out how to animate her drawings.

Reinterpreting a masterpiece

Instead of interpreting the Britten Interludes as a series of seascapes, Kempthorn entitled her project “Ordinary Magic: A Sunday in the Cuyahoga Valley.” In it, the music becomes a jumping-off point for evocations of Northeast Ohio landscapes viewed through a picture window that functions as a frame within the frame of the film itself.

In Kempthorn’s animation, the high notes in the strings that announce the sunrise in “Dawn,’’ are accompanied by a dangling lightbulb that gently pulses as the sky brightens. A fluttering motif played by flutes, evoking seabirds in the Britten composition, is envisioned by Kempthorn as a sonic portrayal of a swallowtail butterfly.

In Kempthorn’s version of “Sunday Morning,’’ buckets filled with water march like characters in Disney’s “Fantasia’' toward a gleaming blue motorcycle, which stands ready to be washed by brushes that magically dip themselves into the buckets before getting to work.

Individual cels, or images, from Amber Kempthorn's animation of Benjamin Britten's "Four Sea Interludes'' are on view at Bonfoey Gallery in Cleveland through November 5, 2022. Steven Litt, cleveland.com

In Kempthorn’s “Moonlight,’’ a full moon swings gently back and forth across the screen in time to Britten’s music, before dipping into a river and rising again, even brighter than before. In “Storm,’’ a draftsman’s compass lurches across the stage-like space framed by the window like a seaman fighting to keep his balance on the deck of a heeling ship battered by waves.

At times, the viewpoint zooms slowly through the window frame, allowing the landscape in the film to expand and envelop the eye. At other times, the viewpoint pulls back to encompass the window, which turns the animation into something resembling an enchanted still life filled with objects that have a mind of their own.

Kempthorn’s imagery, which includes a hopping hammer, a tape measure that somersaults across the screen, the Goodyear blimp, a bouncing Cavaliers’ basketball, and a foaming bottle of Budweiser, are personal and autobiographical, but universal enough to engage the viewer in a kind of playful give-and-take over what they might mean.

It’s worth mentioning that a rainbow-hued mug in the animation represents a mug once owned by the late Cleveland artist Dan Tranberg, which he gave to Kempthorn as a gift. Tranberg was a highly admired painter and teacher at the Cleveland Institute of Art, a former art critic for The Plain Dealer, and a close friend of Kempthorn’s who died of heart failure after a long struggle with leukemia in 2017 at age 53.

Individual cels, or images, from Amber Kempthorn's animation of Benjamin Britten's "Four Sea Interludes'' are on view at Bonfoey Gallery in Cleveland through November 5, 2022. Steven Litt, cleveland.com

The general thrust of “Ordinary Magic: A Sunday in the Cuyahoga Valley” is that by coordinating open-ended imagery and movement so closely to Britten’s “Interludes,’’ Kempthorn heightens the enjoyment of the music because she hears — and sees — something fresh in it.

The project is an imaginative reinterpretation in which Kempthorn convincingly expresses her affection for a powerful piece of modern music while taking us along for the ride.

At the end of the animation, Kempthorn evokes the slapstick tradition of Chuck Jones by quoting the famous final image from a 1902 film by Georges Méliès of France, one of the earliest films ever made. I won’t spoil that moment here. Viewers will have to see the complete project to appreciate the kicker at the conclusion.

Hint: it involves the moon and the Goodyear blimp. It’s a fitting reference that brings together Akron, Britten, and Kempthorn’s newfound enthusiasm for animation and film.

https://www.cleveland.com/news/2022/10/artist-amber-kempthorns-delightful-animation-of-benjamin-brittens-sea-interludes-set-for-saturday-premiere-with-akron-symphony-orchestra.html

AMBER KEMPTHORN: (EXTRA)ORDINARY MAGIC

by Doug Utter

Moonlight, a still from Amber Kempthorn’s animated film, Ordinary Magic: A Sunday in the Cuyahoga Valley, set to music of Benjamin Britten. The film will have its world premiere October 15 at EJ Thomas Hall in Akron, Ohio, with Britten’s Four Sea Interludes, Op. 33 performed by the Akron Symphony Orchestra.

Amber Kempthorn stirs meticulously-rendered everyday objects and revelatory encounters into the sweeping stardust of her dream-like works on paper. Since earning an MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2008, the Northeast Ohio native (born in Cuyahoga Falls, she also attended Ohio’s College of Wooster and Hiram College) has developed a tantalizing style, glimmering with mystique and memory as it upends the ordinary, moving familiar things into a landscape of the mind reminiscent of classic Chinese painting or Ukiyo-E visual drama. A cup with a rainbow, a bottle that might well be Budweiser, a lawn chair, a bunch of cherries materialize against a cloudy backdrop; or fragments of American pop culture heritage suggest a bygone state of mind: a fading mid-career John Wayne poster in one work is almost an homage; or a cartoon vulture, loafing under a dead tree, is almost a shock. Unironic, Kempthorn’s objects seem to float above and beyond their original context, free to invoke nostalgia, the feel of a past not so much mourned as missed. Something about Kempthorn’s lapidary birds and richly-textured tennis shoes, unworn tools and glowing lightbulbs, and the way they all seem to move in and out of her atmospheric pictorial grounds—something about this eccentric tide of musings feels musical, as if a soundtrack to Kempthorn’s digressions has been dialed back to silence but still hums inaudible tunes to the unconscious mind. Her paintings embody melodies of a visible, touchable sort, beloved places and fond things enriched by the artist’s hand.

In 2019 Amber Kempthorn found a few minutes, between her teaching duties at Hiram and Wooster and the Cleveland Institute of Art, to make an answer to the broad granting “Challenge” issued periodically by the Akron-based John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Knight offers substantial financial support to the best projects proposed by artists from the three regions it serves, in response to the question “What is your best idea for the arts?” There are only two stipulations: 1. The idea must be about the arts. 2. The project must take place in either Akron, Detroit, or Miami. Winners are awarded funding from a pool of about a million dollars, but are expected to come up with matching monies raised through their own efforts. Both generous and daunting, it’s not a deal that many artists are able to accept. But Kempthorn had what she thought was a truly viable idea. She submitted a 150-word pitch that described her own dream project.

Dawn, still from Amber Kempthorn’s animated film, Ordinary Magic: A Sunday in the Cuyahoga Valley. Image courtesy of the artist.

It germinated in childhood, when she was first stirred by the combined impact of narrative cartoons and symphonic music—a thought that she now developed as a plan to bring a work of classical music to a broader audience through the medium of animation. Her own musical knowledge and likings runs from pop and rock all the way to modern classical compositions. But especially important to her are the orchestral works brought to audiences, and especially to children, by the film industry. Disney Studios’ output, of course, has entertained and educated several generations of audiences world-wide with films that quote or sometimes satirize aspects of classical music. Probably best of all was Disney’s magical 1940 Fantasia, which may have starred Mickey Mouse but went on to make animation history using musical themes by Beethoven, Stravinsky, Stokowski, Paul Dukas (composer of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice) and others.

Not long before the Knight proposal Kempthorn had read a biography of Benjamin Britten, the preeminent twentieth-century British composer. Britten’s dramatic experimental music, his socially-engaged performance practice, and his relationship with his life partner, the tenor Peter Pears, lead her to pick Britten’s oeuvre as a source for the animation project. Not that Britten’s music was news to her—among her favorite modern classics were his Four Sea Interludes. By means of whatever synesthetic magic, those evocative pieces engaged her visual sense with particular vividness. Published separately from the opera Peter Grimes, Britten’s lovely yet fraught interregnums are often performed on their own as an orchestral suite.

Sunday Morning, still from Amber Kempthorn’s animated film, Ordinary Magic: A Sunday in the Cuyahoga Valley. Image courtesy of the artist.

“When I heard the music, at least ten years ago, I saw the moon moving across the sky!” We were watching the first of her four animations, “Moonlight,” on a laptop screen, and I knew exactly what she meant; a delicately-rendered, crater-riven paper moon was swinging like a pendulum in the darkening sky beyond a grid of window panes. Then leaving the window behind, the vision unscrolled, following the orb’s rhythmic progress until it plunged into the dark waters. Maybe these were the currents of the Shropshire Bay where the tragic climax of Peter Grimes takes place, but the water was still and calm. The music is full of hidden energies and promise. First performed in 1945 near the end of the Second World War, Peter Grimes premiered on June 7 that year, the second day of the Normandy invasion, a pivotal moment in world history that continues to echo in the postmodern era.

The opera itself is based on a section of the broad historical narrative poem The Borough by British poet George Crabbe, published in 1810. A story about social consciousness, private ambition, vanity and cruelty and the slow motions of universal justice, it was among the first important works of social realism in English literature, much admired by Britten and Pears and by their friend W.H. Auden. The Four Sea Interludes, which begin with an evocation of dawn, followed by the bright doings of a “Sunday Morning,” skipping to solemn moonlight and finally—as in the climax of Crabbe’s piece—a violent storm.

The Knight panelists were intrigued and gave Kempthorn a green light to pursue her plan, which included a public performance of Britten’s work by the Akron Symphony Orchestra, coordinated with a screening of the animation. Conversations with the orchestra’s conductor Christopher Wilkins and Executive Director Paul Jarrett were productive, but another area of immediate concern was the animation itself. Kempthorn had the artistic props for the job, but she’d never actually animated anything. At this point she approached a reputable Akron-based animation group, Red Point Digital, and began the collaboration that would bring her drawings and the familiar daily objects of her visual repertoire to life. A grant for $52,000.00 was offered as these parts of the plan began to fall into place, which the artist would match in a series of fundraising activities and events over a specified period of time. Easier said than done. Within a month the COVID pandemic swept across the globe changing public life and activity in unforeseeable ways; progress with Kempthorn’s project slowed down to a crawl. In the end everything may have worked to her advantage, though; since she needed to tuck two different, new skill sets under her belt, she probably needed the extra time. She had little experience of the ins and outs of not-for-profit fundraising. She needed to find sources of expertise in that world as well.

When I visited Amber Kempthorn at her home on the Hiram College campus to discuss the project, known now as Ordinary Magic, the visuals made to accompany the first three sections of Britten’s music were pretty much ready to go. By now the moon wasn’t the only character that swung and floated, bounced or twisted across the animated proscenium. Starting with a view through the multi-paned window, various objects—that rainbow cup, a pencil, a tape measure—had taken on a life of their own. In “Sunday Morning,” for instance, a bucket, hose and sponge decide to get busy (Cinderella-style), washing and rinsing a vintage blue motorcycle parked outside near a lawn chair. To the left a clothesline supports a flapping towel that adds its own striped flair to the balletic mayhem, as the ever-iconic Goodyear Blimp soars majestically overhead. At one point in the action dozens of soap bubbles multiply, glinting and filling the screen. Each section has a gently-comic dimension alternating with poignantly-lovely passages, matching the violins and woodwinds measure for measure. A beautiful, slender moth flutters and twirls to the music of a flute, acting as prima ballerina. All of this makes visual sense, thanks to the charm and persuasiveness of Kempthorn’s drawing, added to the skill of the various animators and the aptness of the animation software, courtesy of Red Point Digital.

Britten’s fourth Interlude is titled “Storm.” Turbulent music evokes the anger and frustration of the Shropshire townspeople, who have tried to save a young apprentice from the cruelly-ambitious fisherman Peter Grimes, and describes the violent coastal storms that take the lives of both apprentice and master. Here Kempthorn uses her pencil-character and the thin, lash-like marks that it makes to evoke the circling turbulence of the rain and wind, a self-referentiality that recalls many such tropes in early cartoons—ending with a scene featuring the moon and a sly nod to another lunar moment in history-making cinematic iconography.

The world premiere of the animated film Ordinary Magic: A Sunday in the Cuyahoga Valley by Amber Kempthorn will be presented “live” on screen accompanied by the Akron Symphony Orchestra playing Benjamin Britten’s Four Sea Interludes Op.33 on October 15 at E.J. Thomas Hall in Akron, Ohio.

One hundred drawings selected from Amber Kempthorn’s preparatory studies and cels made for her work Ordinary Magic: A Sunday in the Cuyahoga Valley will open to be public and displayed throughout Bonfoey Gallery on October 7, in Cleveland, Ohio.

https://canjournal.org/amber-kempthorn-extraordinary-magic/

Drawing from the Music of Benjamin Britten

by Amber Kempthorn

14 FEB 2021 • 7 MIN READ

I think in pictures. Like a single seed that eventually forms an arbor, this particular trait has determined the entire infrastructure of my practice as an artist and has continued to shape my life in many other ways.

Hopeless with verbal directions, I am an excellent navigator with a map (in the shapeless expanse of my mind, without visual signposts it’s hard to see the way ahead). As a champion list-maker, my morning ritual of writing down the pile of tasks that accumulated in my sleeping brain becomes crucial visual evidence of my thoughts. The act of recording them, akin to the act of drawing, makes those thoughts more concrete to me. In both cases, the internal visual becomes something externally physical, a tangible thing that I can look upon again, reinforcing, confirming the existence of the other.

"For nearly a decade I have been making still pictures of things as they pass through time, attempting to capture with drawing what is ephemeral. Now, rather than stopping time, I am activating it."

When I read books or listen to music, the words appear to me in images. I seewhat they’re singing, what they’ve written. The words are vehicles that take me across the pictorial narrative of my own life. As an artist I pick my way across this landscape, using a combination of processes to create my work. I begin with the use of an airbrush to create an atmospheric base on paper, then the narrative objects and landscape are constructed in layers with graphite, ink, gouache, stencils, and collage. For over a decade I have used drawing to translate interior images for the outer world, creating densely layered, melancholic, and playful reflections of the mind’s life.

The first time I heard English composer Benjamin Britten’s orchestral piece Moonlight was a powerful occasion because of what I saw. Unique, in a way, because I saw sounds, not lyrics. The haunting, crawling strings became an incandescent full moon dragged across a night sky. The flute became flickering fire flies and street lamps. An entire narrative began to unfold.

For years I would listen to Britten’s “Four Sea Interludes,” eager to return to Moonlight, the third interlude, because my visual mind had begun to imagine more than still pictures. Moonlight had become a “place,” harboring a story that grew more elaborate with each visit. The same desire that compels me to make drawings now had a new dimension. Something else was required. The music had to be translated into moving pictures.

Drawings for Animation (compilation) (2019/2020) | gouache & watercolor on paper

Britten’s “Four Sea Interludes” was written as orchestral scene changes for his opera, Peter Grimes. Maybe his most famous opera, Peter Grimes was inspired by The Borough, a poem by George Crabbe, which details several narratives in a small seaside village inspired by the coastal landscape of Suffolk, England. The “Four Sea Interludes” reflects Britten’s ardent attachment to the sea and Suffolk, his childhood home. Sonorous and compelling, the interludes are often performed on their own. Peter Grimes is a powerful example of Britten’s own affinity for interpretation, spending much of his career translating the written word into music. He composed scores for theatre and cinema, as well as orchestral pieces based on the works of W.H. Auden, Emily Bronte, and Thomas Mann.

"To draw is to record. In its most poetic sense, drawing is evidence of the presence of life: the first footprints in fresh snow, the arc of white cloud behind an airplane, a signature, a fossilized fern in bedrock."

Britten is also known for his contribution to children’s music education with the beloved The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra from 1945. Broken into sections, beginning with a full orchestra, the composition goes on to isolate families of instruments into themes and variations, audibly demonstrating the unique job of each of the parts that make up the whole. It is in this spirit that another famous orchestral piece written for children was structured. In Peter and the Wolf, a childhood favorite, Prokofiev’s narrator begins, “Each character in this story is represented by a different instrument.”

After years of contemplation, I began to nurture my desire to translate Moonlight into an animation. This formula, of assigning characters to musical instruments, became a formative idea. As I turned my thoughts to making the animation, I was surprised at how, seemingly undetected, the interludes had become four fully formed narratives in my mind. The process of translating instruments/sounds into unique visual elements would anchor my approach as I wrote each of the scripts. In the first interlude, Dawn, I began to see a predawn conversation taking place between a lone lightbulb hanging from a kitchen ceiling and the distant sun hidden beneath the horizon. The lightbulb, embodying the violins, appeared to “call” to its counterpart; the horns and timpani became the sun’s response, its eventual rise. An intermittent clarinet turned into a Luna moth making its way across the landscape, drawn to the glow of the light. Over time, another wish took shape. I dreamt not only of creating the animation, but also that its completion would culminate in a performance, a screening with live accompaniment by an orchestra.

Drawings for Animation (compilation) (2020) | acrylic, gouache & graphite on paper

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation makes funding available bi-annually for art projects in my hometown of Akron, Ohio and other major US cities as part of their Knight Arts Challenge (KAC). The process is tiered and opens with a community-wide call for people’s “best idea for the arts.” The starting prompt was simple enough: describe your “best idea” in 150 words or less. The process led me from that succinct description to a final application that ultimately included partnerships with a local orchestra and digital production studio, the creation of an administrative support team, a $150,000 project budget, and a feasible plan to raise the $50,000 that the KAC would hopefully match.

In September 2019, I was awarded a $54,000 matching grant from the Knight Foundation for the creation of my project, “Ordinary Magic: A Sunday in the Cuyahoga Valley.” In collaboration with a production studio, I am creating a fifteen-minute animation that visually interprets Britten’s “Four Sea Interludes” which will be screened with live accompaniment by the Akron Symphony Orchestra in the autumn of 2022.

When I received the congratulatory call from the Knight Foundation I was stunned. In a flash, each of the thoughts that led to that moment synthesized into a sudden realization of the daunting task ahead. I would have to move forward without a map into a field for which I have deep affection but no expertise.

Drawings for Animation (compilation) (2020) | gouache & watercolor on paper

As I reflect on the past year of work on my first animations, the nature of my relationship with time is changing, causing my practice to undergo a visually subtle but perceptively radical transition. For nearly a decade I have been making still pictures of things as they pass through time, attempting to capture with drawing what is ephemeral. Now, rather than stopping time, I am activating it.

To draw is to record. In its most poetic sense, drawing is evidence of the presence of life: the first footprints in fresh snow, the arc of white cloud behind an airplane, a signature, a fossilized fern in bedrock. In novelist and playwright Christopher Isherwood’s “A Berlin Diary” he wrote:

I am a camera with a shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.

As Isherwood mentally recorded pictures to develop later, with each drawing I set out to record or fix what is fleeting. When I begin a drawing, what I hope or intend to communicate is planned, sketched in advance. As I work, I treat each drawing’s rectangular borders like an aperture that opens when I make the first mark and closes when I complete the last. Each drawing is an accumulation of images, culled from mental scraps and observations, interwoven with visual evidence of the time in which it was made. An artifact of that time might be represented by a pine cone I collected on a walk, or a particular bird I spotted at the feeder. Like a glass jar full of ocean water and sand marked with the date of collection, the artwork is simultaneously a time capsule and a story. Finally, aperture closed, the drawing is a winding, layered, nonsensical narrative that both reflects and captures something of the world.

No Ordinary Blue (after Guston) (2019) | acrylic, gouache, watercolor & graphite on paper | 44 x 30 inches

As I’ve transitioned from making still drawings to moving images, what has been most remarkable is learning the mechanisms it takes to create the perception of movement. Drawn elements are no longer singular; they are “frames” strung together to create action. Human vision processes roughly twelve frames per second, turning them into motion. The more frames, the more fluid the movement. Individually, these frames are almost invisible to the eye; ultimately, they are understood by the viewer through accumulation rather than contemplation. For over a decade I’ve used drawing to capture thoughts and moments, to concretize them, to immobilize them for examination. Now my efforts, my drawings, succeed in a way, when they can’t be individually perceived.

"the artwork is simultaneously a time capsule and a story. Finally, aperture closed, the drawing is a winding, layered, nonsensical narrative that both reflects and captures something of the world."

In animation, the term “onion skinning” refers to the transparent layering of image onto image to visualize movement by seeing several frames at once. Each drawing is like an apparition that the mind registers as it disappears into another drawing. This conjures something Britten is supposed to have said: “Composing is like driving down a foggy road toward a house. Slowly you see more details of the house—the color of the slates and bricks, the shape of the windows. The notes are the bricks and mortar of the house.”

This quote leads me to think of the moment Britten’s music first passed through my ears, entering my mind, which formed it into pictures, becoming the foundation for this new experience. A seemingly unremarkable event that I will now spend years carefully working to capture, grateful for the moonlight on the foggy road ahead. ◘

https://api.symposeum.us/drawing-from-the-music-of-benjamin-britten/

Cleveland Arts Prize

When it came to becoming an artist, Amber Kempthorn will tell you she had no choice. She’s just always done it. As a child growing up in Cuyahoga Falls, she spent many hours at their neighbor’s house getting lost in their significant library of art books.

“I would drag them home and sit and copy all of them,” Amber says today. “I couldn’t possibly tell you why, other than I loved to do it.”

She began by majoring in English because she also loved to read. Then her compelling study abroad experiences during her freshman, junior and senior years at Hiram College, during which she traveled to England and through Guatemala, Mexico and El Salvador, fired her passions for politics and social justice.

“As humans, we tend to want to make things binary,” she says, having then designed her major around the study of human rights. “Eventually I accepted that I could be and do all of these things, finally completing my BA in Studio Art at Hiram, by bringing my passion for reading, writing, and social justice into my thesis work. I just accepted that I had to pursue the thing that I loved most and needed to do, which was artmaking.”

Amber went on to graduate with a Post Baccalaureate degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2006 and she received her MFA in Sculpture at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2008. There she heightened her focus on her beloved drawing skills.

“Drawing and sculpture have a beautiful relationship that is often not highlighted, especially in contemporary sculpture that is more conceptually driven where there’s a lot of discussion around ephemerality, recording and documenting,” she says. “These ideas became the foundational approach for how I think about drawing.”

Amber holds a Lecturer position in the Drawing Department at the Cleveland Institute of Art where she has taught since 2012. She also teaches courses as a member of the adjunct faculty at The College of Wooster.

“I love teaching,” she says. “How fortunate I am to make a living where I can help young artists on a path to figuring out themselves, find their mode of expression, feel confident about sharing that with the world, and carve out a space for their own independence, identity and lives.”

Several years ago, she began focusing on the landscape and drawing ordinary objects wherein her work has become more about the implied sense of humanity by not directly representing the figure. She also explores time and nostalgia through drawing.

“My drawings are densely layered, melancholic, and playful reflections of the mind’s life,” she says. “I am deeply drawn to the subject of nostalgia, best described by the writer Michael Chabon as ‘…the ache that arises from the consciousness of lost connection.’ I find this ache to be poignant evidence of our human consciousness and attempt to capture it with drawing.”

“If you look at her work, there’s a lot of landscape, a lot of birds,” observes Heather McGill, retired head of the Sculpture Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art. “That’s been a preoccupation since she was a student at Cranbrook, and by the end that was becoming pretty obvious that she’d be recording and using nature as an essential part of her work to talk about time and change and life.”

Amber’s work has been exhibited across the U.S. and was included in the inaugural Front International Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art and most recently in More is More: Visual Richness in Contemporary Art at the Akron Art Museum. She was invited by the artist Jonathan Horowitz to make an artwork for his internet project, The Daily Trumpet. In 2018, Amber provided drawings for Rock This Town! Backstage in Cleveland: Stories you never heard and swag you never saw by Fran Belkin.

In 2019 she received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award and a $54,000 grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation for her animation project, Ordinary Magic: A Sunday in the Cuyahoga Valley, visually translating Benjamin Britten’s “Four Sea Interludes, Op. 33” as performed by the Akron Symphony Orchestra. The 15-minute film created in collaboration with Red Point Digital in Akron premiered on October 15 at the E.J. Thomas Performing Arts Center in Akron. (With) drawing, a companion exhibit of more than 200 of Amber’s exquisitely rendered drawings for the creation of Ordinary Magic is on view at the Bonfoey Gallery through November 5, 2022.

https://clevelandartsprize.org/artists/amber-d-kempthorn/