Jill Krutick, “Ray of Sunshine.” Oil on canvas, 40″ x 30″

After more than 20 years in the corporate world as an investment analyst and media executive, Jill Krutick W’84 was ready for a change. Why not, she thought, give “full-time artist” a try?

Krutick had been painting since childhood, initially copying the old masters —Van Gogh, Monet—but over time evolving her own style. She kept painting through business school and the jobs that followed, returning to her art during maternity leave or “whenever my job allowed a little extra time.”

Over the years, her work transformed from “geometric” to a “much more free-form” style, she says. “I’d describe my work as abstract expressionism, but each piece is different from the last. Depending on how the light, color and texture interplay, my paintings can range from fairly representational to truly abstract.”

Krutick now spends most days painting inside her bright Scarsdale home studio—or, when time permits, traveling the world to “collect colors.”

Jill Krutick, “Stairway to Heaven.” Oil on canvas, 36″ x 24″

“If we’re out on a family vacation to Antarctica, for example, I’ll be looking at the way the icebergs reflect the sun and each other and the water and the mountains,” she says. “All of that will be seared into my mind, and when I come home, I try to capture a lot of that feeling on canvas.”

She’s had several solo and group shows over the last few years, and was named a “trending artist” last year by the art gallery website Artsicle. “Of course, the ultimate dream is to have my paintings hanging in the Museum of Modern Art,” she says. “That is a lofty goal, but one I’d definitely love to achieve over time. I really want to develop this craft and this art, continue to grow as an artist and continue to broaden the public who enjoy following my work.”

This Friday, Saturday and Sunday (May 10-12, 2013), Krutick will open up her home studio to present a solo exhibit of nearly 100 works. “I see it as an opportunity to share my passion with the community and generate more interest and excitement,” she says. You can find more on that open house here.

Jill Krutick, “Field of Dreams.” Oil on canvas, 36″ x 36″

Jill Krutick, “Lady Liberty.” Oil on canvas, 30″ x 24″

Filed under: Alumni, Visual Art ]]> http://penngazettearts.com/2013/05/07/from-finance-to-fine-arts/feed/ 1 molly Ray of Sunshine Jill Krutick Stairway to Heaven Field of Dreams Oil Painting on canvas by Jill Krutick, 30 x 24 inches, 2012 http://penngazettearts.com/2013/04/19/spotted-on-campus/ http://penngazettearts.com/2013/04/19/spotted-on-campus/#comments Fri, 19 Apr 2013 16:45:35 +0000 molly http://penngazettearts.com/?p=4286 Continue reading →]]> As Penn has been preparing for the Time to Shine festivities tonight, we’ve been watching a chalk artist’s work take shape at the 34th and Walnut entrance to Locust Walk.

Here’s what we spotted on Tuesday morning:

By Wednesday, it had evolved into this:

And then yesterday evening, we finally got to see the completed piece:

The artist’s name is Hani Shihada, and this isn’t his first time making art on a sidewalk. Shihada’s website features numerous examples of his past work, and here he is drawing Spongebob on a New York City sidewalk:

While the story included a handy info box with Penn’s Coursera offerings, we wanted to let you know about two arts-and-culture-oriented MOOCs that both start later this month: Greek and Roman Mythology and Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society.

First, here’s the skinny on Greek and Roman Mythology — taught by Peter Struck, associate professor of classical studies and director of Benjamin Franklin Scholars — from the Coursera site:

Myths are traditional stories that have endured over a long time. Some of them have to do with events of great importance, such as the founding of a nation. Others tell the stories of great heroes and heroines and their exploits and courage in the face of adversity. Still others are simple tales about otherwise unremarkable people who get into trouble or do some great deed. What are we to make of all these tales, and why do people seem to like to hear them? This course will focus on the myths of ancient Greece and Rome, as a way of exploring the nature of myth and the function it plays for individuals, societies, and nations. We will also pay some attention to the way the Greeks and Romans themselves understood their own myths. Are myths subtle codes that contain some universal truth? Are they a window on the deep recesses of a particular culture? Are they a set of blinders that all of us wear, though we do not realize it? Or are they just entertaining stories that people like to tell over and over? This course will investigate these questions through a variety of topics, including the creation of the universe, the relationship between gods and mortals, human nature, religion, the family, sex, love, madness, and death.

Assigned readings will include Homer’s Odyssey, Vergil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. As Struck told Trey Popp: “My bread-and-butter course has always been this mythology class” — and it sounds like a fun one to us. It starts in two weeks, on April 22, and you can sign up here.

Karl Ulrich, vice dean of innovation at Wharton and CIBC Professor of Entrepreneurship and e-Commerce, is teaching Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society starting April 29. Coursera lists it in the Information, Tech, and Design class category and says it will combine “fundamental concepts with hands-on design challenges to become a better designer.”

It’s meant for anyone who’s interested in designing something — regardless of what category that “something” may fall under — as noted in this extended description (emphasis ours):

This is a course aimed at making you a better designer. The course marries theory and practice, as both are valuable in improving design performance. Lectures and readings will lay out the fundamental concepts that underpin design as a human activity. Weekly design challenges test your ability to apply those ideas to solve real problems. The course is deliberately broad — spanning all domains of design, including architecture, graphics, services, apparel, engineered goods, and products. The emphasis of the course is the basic design process: define, explore, select, and refine. You, the student, bring to the course your particular interests and expertise related to, for instance, engineering, furniture, fashion, architecture, or products. In prior sessions of the course about half of the participants were novices and about half had prior professional design expertise. Both groups seem to benefit substantially from the course. All project work is evaluated by your peers — and indeed, you will also be a peer reviewer. This format allows you to see an interesting collection of projects while getting useful feedback on your own project.

Ulrich himself helped design this scooter, the TerraPass system and Gushers fruit snacks. He talks about those creations and his plans for the class in this introductory video:

Of course, if you do enroll in one of these Penn MOOCs, we’d love to hear about your experience!

Here’s how it works: People call a Google Voice phone number and read an actual poem. Google Voice transcribes that reading, mishearing much of it and spitting out what is essentially a brand-new poem. Carroll then posts the new Google Voice-ified version of the poem, along with a link to the original work, on his website.

A Penn English major and former assistant director of development at the Kelly Writers House, Carroll answered a few questions for us via email about his site and the poems it’s produced so far.

I love this idea of having Google Voice make its own weird poems out of actual poems. It’s a great twist on the Google-Voice-transcriptions-as-poetry concept. How did you come up with this?

Well, I’ll tell the unnecessarily LONG version so I provide the proper context. I started a Google Voice account when the service started years ago. I didn’t know if it’d be something I used, but it was intriguing enough that I figured I should get a local number and just hold onto it. And I didn’t use it much at all, but it was still linked with my email. So I occasionally got weird messages and voicemails from it — typically spam, trying to tell me I’d won a free iPad or something.

But in December, I received a hilarious voicemail from a couple that had tried to dial 215-821-4761, which I only know because they left a message where they discovered their error, talked about it, tried to figure out how to delete a message, then finally hung up. And the only thing more delightful than the message itself was Google’s attempt at a transcript: “Over. Over. Okay bye. So I just want to put the tanks flooring and I found very racist. 643-4764, that’s 7 network, Okay bye. Not. I need that we do call. We races. Your. Sorry order, Yeah, well at ever. It is proper response option. Yeah.”

I posted it to my Twitter account since I found it so funny, and Lily Applebaum C’12 —who works at Kelly Writers House — sent a reply that said: “That’s the best poem I’ve read all day!” And her reply reminded me that Google Voice “Poetry” is something that exists — so I thought I’d submit it to that site. That’s how it existed in my head: there’s a site out there that posts Google Voice transcripts that are particularly funny. But when I searched for it, I found that there were dozens of sites that did it.

And it’s such a minor thing, but it bothered me!  Poetry can be difficult, but I think it’s too often dismissed as abstract — or weird for the sake of weird — by people who just don’t want to take the time to read it closely. And while I don’t mind people not reading poetry, I guess I did mind all of these sites that were copying one another. So I wanted to try something different.

The site was ultimately born from the idea that poetry is not awful and random, but that I could take this popular idea (bad transcription = poem!) and apply it to poems themselves. It reminded me of something I could have done in a Penn class I took with Kenneth Goldsmith called Uncreative Writing. Let me produce a new piece of writing by using something that already exists.

From there, it just continued to grow. I called to start it. Then I asked friends to call. Then I started using the vast PennSound archives to play readings to Google Voice. And then I started to recall shows and movies that featured poems. It started as something that I thought might be fun for a few days and became something that I’d like to maintain for a while.

Why did you decide to start with Emily Dickinson?

The poem is important to me. You can find it excerpted on the dedication plaque inside the Kelly Writers House, which was an important place for me both as its student, employee and alum. I don’t think I’d be interested in poetry without that place and its people, or without being ushered to Emily and her work. So it just seemed like a natural place to start. Her importance also helped establish that nothing was off-limits. I wasn’t creating this blog to make fun of bad poems. I wanted to feed anything and everything to Google Voice to see what came out on the other side.

Which has been your favorite Google Voice-ified poem so far?

Oof. This was harder to choose than I thought. There are so many good ones. I love the Mad Men reading of Frank O’Hara because it’s opened up some new possibilities in the future. And Tom Devaney called himself after I fed Google Voice a recording of him, so that was a thrill.  But if I’m picking one, it’d have to be “Ontology of Chang and Eng, the Original Siamese Twins” by Cathy Park Hong.

“Ontology” just struck me as both hilarious as a translation and perfect for the goals of the site: its shape and formatting guide your reading, so it’s exactly the type of work someone might dismiss as too abstract for them. And Google Voice just couldn’t make any sense of it, because it’s built to transcribe simple messages between people. So “Eng” becomes “And” and the poem just mutates into this big, indecipherable mess. I was laughing the entire time I was formatting it for the site.

Is there one that you’ve felt turned out better than the original?

Just today I posted a translation of the poem that Julia Stiles reads in the movie 10 Things I Hate About You. The poem is a pretty simple, rhyming piece: the kind of thing you’d expect someone who’s never read much poetry to write. Is the translation better? Maybe, maybe not. But what I like about it is how it gets a lot of the content right, but strips all of the format and musicality. It’s what I’d expect Julia Stiles to read in the movie if she was wearing a beret and didn’t love the guy. So maybe it’s not better, but it equals the trashiness of the original, and that’s probably the best work Google Voice has done so far.

If you want to read a poem for Carroll’s site and see what Google Voice comes up with, here’s the process:

1.  Dial (215) 821-7461.
2.  Leave your full name when prompted.
3.  State the poem’s title and author.
4.  Read the poem. (A note from Carroll: Google Voice has a 3-minute limit on voicemail, so you either have to be brief or call a few times!)

Greg Dunn, Cerebellar Lobe (2012)
22K gold, dye, and enamel on aluminized panel
Depicts the cerebellum, a region of the brain required for movement and motor memory.

Though he came to Penn as a Ph.D student in neuroscience, Greg Dunn Gr’11 always had a strong artistic bent. First his fascination was with music, then graphic design, then paintings from the Edo period in Japan. “I always needed a creative outlet,” he says, and he found his latest muse right there in the University labs.

As a neuroscience student, “you’re just looking at these gorgeous images of neurons all day,” Dunn notes. As he examined gold-leaf-stained neuron slices, “I just instantly thought of classic Chinese and Japanese art. It was such beautiful source material.”

He began painting based on what he saw under the microscope, and by graduation, he’d produced numerous works that now hang in universities, medical centers and private homes. “I don’t consider what I do to necessarily be ‘science art,’” he says. “I’m painting something that scientists happen to be studying, but painting a landscape of the brain is no different than painting a forest.”

While the people buying his work are “mostly academics” — neuroscientists, neurologists, doctors — Dunn says people with neurodegenerative diseases have also shown interest. “I think it helps them to see something good about something they’ve been so frustrated with,” he adds.

Cortex in Metallic Pastels (2009)
21K gold, palladium, enamel, mica, and dye on aluminized panel
Layered structure of the cerebral cortex, where processing of sensory and motor information occur.

When he’s not working on his art, Dunn meditates inside the sensory deprivation tank he bought himself as a graduation present. He says the darkness and quiet inside the tank can “really aid in reaching deeper states of meditation…things become very calm and you’re starkly alone with your thoughts. A lot of times ideas for my art will come to me while I’m in the tank. Without question, I always paint better after I’ve meditated.”

Is there any chance he’ll leave the artist’s life behind and go back to the lab someday? “No way. Absolutely no chance,” he says. “But I really love the scientific process, and it’s something that I try to bring into my art in various ways. And I wouldn’t be doing this in the first place without my background in neuroscience.”

With Dunn’s permission, here are some of the paintings he’s created, starting with Glomerulus, which hangs on campus inside the John Morgan Building’s Barchi Library (click any image to see the full gallery):

Image: Disney/Pixar

Come Sunday evening, we may or may not see Brave win an academy award for Best Animated Feature Film.

What we will almost certainly see, during whichever clip rolls on-screen at the ceremony, is the work of more than half a dozen alumni, all graduates of Penn’s Digital Media Design (DMD) program. Through their work at Pixar, Paul Kanyuk EAS’05, Ariela Nurko EAS’09, Nathan Zeichner EAS’11 GEng’12, Emily Weihrich EAS’10, Samantha Raja EAS’10 GEng’10 and Nadim Sinno GEng’10 all helped bring Brave to fruition.

Paul Kanyuk EAS’05 / Image: Pixar

We spoke with Kanyuk earlier this week about his role as the “crowds technical lead” for Brave — and first found out exactly what that title means.

“Normally, a professional animator can take weeks to animate a single character,” he says. “When you have hundreds on screen, you can’t just do things the same old way. I was in charge of overseeing the technical aspects of how to animate and render those crowd shots.”

Once you start looking for them, you’ll find crowds everywhere in Brave. In fact, nearly one in five shots in the 2012 film featured a crowd, according to Kanyuk. This short trailer includes one of his major crowd-animation scenes:

As does this one:

So in Pixar-world, what constitutes a crowd? “My joke is, ‘Three is a crowd,’” Kanyuk says with a chuckle. “All our software and techniques tend to be built toward small personal moments and as a result, a crowd can be as small as three — but usually they’ll kick it my way when it’s 10 or more. It’s the 10 to 50 range that’s most challenging. You can’t get away with the same tricks you can for bigger groups, like reusing the same characters in multiple places.”

While they may not garner the same attention as a main character, crowds boost an animated film’s realism, Kanyuk says. “With computer animation, you have to build everything. You have to create an environment, but unless it’s inhabited, you’ll notice it’s fake instantly. Part of the role of crowds is not to be noticed and to make things look alive. At the same time, the stakes are very high.”

Paul Kanyuk EAS’05

Kanyuk’s work at Pixar dates back to 2004, when he interned there and created “chipped paint, rust and dust” for Cars. He returned for a full-time job directly after graduation and has been working there ever since. Over the years, he’s developed crowd scenes for several Best Animated Feature Oscar-winners, including Ratatouille (2007), WALL*E (2008) and Up (2009).

“Ratatouille was one of the first times I got to work on group pack movement,” he says. “It was very fun. We made little brains for the rats and then had a program that told them what to do based on information in their environment.” The film also resulted in one of Kanyuk’s favorite crowd shots: a colony of rats falling through an elderly woman’s ceiling. (We couldn’t find a video online, but trust us — it’s a memorable moment.)

After spending two-and-a-half years creating Brave’s crowds — his small team of six included fellow alumni Zeichner and Weihrich — Kanyuk began work on Monsters University, due out this summer. (Crowd scenes in the trailer below start around 0:37.)

So will he be watching this weekend to see if Brave wins the Oscar? “Absolutely.” And so will crowds across the country.

She’s currently preparing for the publication of her second collection of poems, An Ethic (Nightboat Books, 2013), which is dedicated to her late father — and fellow Penn alum — John H. Davis GrE’70.

“When my father died [in 2006], the only way I knew to encounter his death was to use my poems to ask questions,” Davis says of her new collection. “I did not want to write an elegy. I find elegies troubling because it’s hard to make someone mourn another human being. I decided instead to honor him by being curious, which is what he was. I gathered all of my questions and honed them down to the one thing I knew — that he was in the ground — and then built An Ethic poem by poem based on that.”

Davis describes her poetry as “minimalist and compressed…but it’s simultaneously very lyrical. My interest is in this intense condensery and the ways in which one word catalyzes another,” she adds. “I strive to reduce something down to its raw essence, devoid of any shells or protective layers.”

With Davis’s permission, here is the first poem from her new collection. It originally appeared in Tuesday: An Art Project.

AN ETHIC

There is no this or that world.

One is not more or less
admitted. Into the entirety

one is invited
and to the entirety
one comes.

There is no this or that world,

only the long illusion we are landlord,
the never-ending study
of anotherness, the ark of ilks and kinds.

It is a later wilderness

in which we find ourselves,
it is an Our thought
if we but find our selves,

we will find that we dwell on the one earth.

I hope we are found
to have lived

on no this or that earth.

Davis also sent along this recording of herself reading the poem:

She says her interest in the form arrived early, right around age 5. She wrote poems throughout her childhood and teenage years, but didn’t fully realize her fascination with the written word until enrolling in Rebecca Bushnell’s Shakespeare course at Penn. She recalls: “I was taking it because I wanted to become an actress. Our first assignment was to look at the Oxford English Dictionary — which I’d never heard of before — and follow the life of one word through all of King Lear. To be perfectly honest, I hadn’t even known that words evolved. I’d been terrified of the dictionary because I thought it was a law, and something deep in me resisted it. I was in the Rosengarten Library basement reference area and when I opened the OED the word I fell upon was ‘zero.’ The fact that a word could have such dynamism and uncertainty — and that I didn’t have to believe in its law because it changes — was so thrilling to me and so liberating. Shortly thereafter, I changed my major to English with a concentration in creative writing.”

When she’s not writing her own poems, Davis works as curator of poetry at Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room. She’s been there for nearly five years now, running programs including an oral history series, and says she often looks to Penn for inspiration. “I revere the work that Al Filreis and Charles Bernstein have done at the Kelly Writers House, and that certainly has guided me,” she says. “I have apprenticed myself to their template. It’s such a generous template.” As a result, “I feel like Penn is still guiding me, it’s still very much a part of my life and work.”

Here’s a look at one of those oral history events, as introduced by Davis herself:

The evening started with a violin performance of “Ordinary People” by English Ph.D. student Melanie Hill. Here’s a snippet:

Following an introduction by President Amy Gutmann, Legend — a singer, songwriter, Grammy winner, philanthropist, activist and Counterparts alumnus — sat down with Camille Charles, director of Penn’s Center for Africana Studies, for a wide-ranging discussion of his work and life.

Growing up in Ohio, Legend was mainly home-schooled and skipped three grades, eventually entering Penn as a 16-year-old freshman. He said he discovered a host of musical influences while living in Philadelphia — including the Roots and Common — and noted that, “no one says, ‘Go to Penn so you can break into the music business’…but it actually was very helpful to me in becoming a recording artist.”

After reflecting on his early days in the industry, Legend discussed his lifelong interest in social justice. It began at home, he said. His family always stressed the importance of giving back, taking in foster children and, at one point, an entire family. “If you’re living a life that means anything,” he added, “you’re fighting for social justice.”

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation — and Kanye West’s now-infamous statement that President George W. Bush “doesn’t care about black people” — Legend got to thinking about the neglect communities around the world have suffered. He launched the Show Me Campaign a few years later, using his 2007 song of the same title as a model:

More specifically, the Show Me Campaign aims to “break the cycle of poverty using solutions that have been proven to improve people’s lives and to give them the opportunities to survive, thrive and succeed,” according to its website.

The conversation in Irvine Auditorium then turned to Legend’s connection with the 2010 documentary Waiting for Superman. Here’s what he said about that:

And here’s the song he wrote for the film:

The evening ended with a question-and-answer session, during which Legend predicted that we will soon see more socially focused music.

To read more about alumnus John Legend, check out this 2011 Gazette interview and 2005 feature.

Before we get into our countdown, ever wonder where people are reading this blog?

It seems the answer is “all over the place.” This past year, we had visitors from Zimbabwe, Argentina, Australia, Thailand and 90 other countries. (Long-distance readers: please say hello sometime in the comments!)

Now, without further ado, here are our five most popular posts from 2012: