EBSQ Blogger of the Week: Dennis Kish & Susan Owens

This week’s EBSQ Blogger of the Week is a blogging duo. Between them they blog about art, life and cats!

Who and where are you?

We (Dennis Kish, Susan Owen) are two artist – craftspeople  who live on the coast in central California. We restore antiques and build furniture. Susan draws and paints and is a photographer.  Dennis is a photographer and digital graphic artist, Susan is also a Celtic folksinger.  Dennis is a recording engineer and occasional pipe organ tuner. We started our artist blog (cadogblog.wordpress.com)  in April of this year.

Dennis had a political blog (Uproot Bush 2004) guess that worked out well. Our seven cats and a dog let us live with them. Our new blog Cadogblog, is a hairy tapestry about art.

Any tips for other EBSQ art bloggers?

Tell Stories.

What’s your musical inspiration of choice when you’re working in your studio?

Susan  doesn’t usually listen to music while drawing since she’s a vocalist and “I tend to get caught up in the lyrics and riffs and forget about the drawing before me, so I turn the television on to a low murmur, sit cross-legged on my bed, and work with what amounts to a cooing version of white noise that I can ignore, and be soothed at the same time. If I were to work to music, it would likely be anything performed by  Yo Yo Ma. Sometimes something very small can start a drawing or story.  a word, a street sign, an offhand comment by a passerby, and a seed is planted, to employ an overused simile.  My drawings begin with a complete idea but as they come out of the pens and the pastels they develop their own lives and souls, becoming become pretty much whatever they please.  I learned early on not to fight them. I do spend time in meditation for a week or so before beginning a drawing.  I  used to wonder whether or not that was a waste of time since the drawings do what they please…but no, meditation is never a waste of time.

On the other hand, Dennis wants tunes. “I must have music for work. J.S. Bach to Carl Stone, with lashings of Richard Thompson, Dietrich Buxtehude, Olivier Messian, The Dropkick Murphys, and Flogging Molly. I’m still at work on  a series of abstract digital prints that I call the Mask Series, mask being a verb rather than a noun in this case, though I guess you could wear some of them too. I start by taking a hapless photograph and then transmogrify it through various digital processes and spells. My most recent mask is #56, and all of the masks are made from one of five photographs.”

What’s coming next from your studio?

A current interest is multimedia collaboration.

We  recently collaborated on  “Yggdrasil’s Music  Box”, (Yggdrasil is the One Tree in Norse mythology), a semi functional cabinet containing a tree with drawers in the trunk and a multi-track audio sound sculpture. They have ideas for some more.

Please visit our Etsy shop http://www.etsy.com/shop/digiprintskishowen

http://cadogblog.wordpress.com/

Thank you Dennis (and Susan) for being an EBSQ Blogger of the Week!

If you are an EBSQ Artist and would like to be considered for Blogger of the Week just add us to your blogroll. I’m searching EBSQ profiles weekly for links to artist’s blogs. If you aren’t an EBSQ Artist, what are you waiting for?

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