Cheryl McPeek Dodds
I met Cheryl through a mutual friend about 1971. The first thing I noticed was her stunning beauty, which she would disavow possessing. Cheryl was a talented artist but was somewhat reluctant to share that with the world. A few years later, our lives diverged, so we lost touch with each other. Recently, I caught up with her and was excited to learn that she had gone on to develop several forms of art expression. She draws, writes, photographs, teaches art, and has published a literary journal. Following is a bio that Cheryl wrote along with samples of her work. Future issues will retrace her artistic life journey.
- Deborah Jessie
Most of my life I’ve been an observer. I’ve been more than willing to sit in the back of the room and listen and watch as people went about being people. It was easier for me to study the clues that made up the mystery of human behavior, than it was to actually go out and participate. In the beginning I made drawings and a few paintings. Often the drawings would start out realistic and then morph into something beyond realism, into a story I wanted to tell. Probably one of the more well-known of those drawings was one that captured a local personality and friend. It’s a drawing that used to hang in the Okay Café for years. It was a drawing of Moe Mosure, who was the owner of the Ok Café and is the Godfather to my youngest son. In the drawing, Moe’s wearing an Ivy Newsboy cap in the fabric of his fantasy.
Subjects of my drawings were sometimes a bit shocking in the story book vision I tried to create. The drawings ranged from the head of a friend’s ex-husband as a balloon, drifting off into space, to birds with claws instead of feathers, rats eating melted faces, and birds having captured Tinkerbell as Peter Pan reached puberty and cast her away. Once, I had a group of 7-year olds tell me about their nightmares as we pretended to toss them into an old dresser drawer and throw them away, never to be seen again. Later, in private, I tried to recreate those children’s nightmares in pencil.
After a few years, I began to wear a camera like a mask, hiding the ache of shyness that I felt. Alcohol was no longer a satisfactory method of breaking through the introversion to give me the courage to speak up and speak out. I wanted to be authentically me without artificial encouragement to participate in life even if that meant that mask would become a permanent accessory to my wardrobe. As time passed, I realized it was much quicker and less expensive to use a digital camera to capture images than to make drawings or even to use a film camera. Software had many more possibilities than the dark room, too. Although perhaps not quite as joyous as drawing, photography and digital image manipulation came in a very close second. And this began a whole new adventure in art.
Most often, I use photographs these days to continue to tell stories. Sometimes they are pure fantasy. Sometimes they have miraculously captured that fraction of a second that forever freezes time, that moment Dorothea Lange refers to as how, “Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.”
Sometimes, when struck by the muse, I would work on a series of photos. One of the earliest series I worked on was of domestic abuse. I used wooden drawing manikins to tell a painful story of abuse. When I showed these to a poet friend of mine, Sam Rasnake, he encouraged me to keep going with it and not hold back. The photographs were powerful images that made even me, feel like I was watching something that was very painful to watch and violating a code of secrecy. Sam gathered up poet friends who became inspired to write poems for the images I had created and Sam turned the series into a much larger series. Later, Cheryl Townsend, an Akron artist and co-founder of the Women’s Art Recognition Movement used some of the images in their magazine of arts in Northeast Ohio.
Another large series I worked on was with dancers. Many of these images have been perfect captures on their own with me just being in the right place at the right time with the camera doing all the work. Others have given me adventures in manipulation of digital images that have brought me many hours of experimentation and smiles.
Intermission
Passionately, I have gone out to photograph history, such as the old roundhouse in Crestline, and the Old Reformatory in Mansfield as well as an ancient temple in Shanghai and temples across Taiwan. I was also able to photograph an old “abandoned” Japanese run prison in Chiayi City, Taiwan.
I’m never really sure I’ve earned the right to call myself an artist. But I can say that after my children, my artistic endeavors have brought me the most joy in life. That’s saying quite a lot.
Copyright for story and photographs held by Cheryl McPeek Dodds.