What Is A Creative Life?
I wanted to talk today about creativity. After all, it is the middle name of my company, Cleary Creative Photography. I’ve been fortunate to be asked to create a few public art projects. Two of those have been with the Dayton Montgomery County Library. A few years ago, the library system here in Montgomery County started modernizing and brought all its buildings into the 21st century. These buildings were paid for with taxpayer money, and we are all thankful to have the new physicalities. At the same time, the library received money from an estate with the explicit instructions to “Do something good” with the money. They came up with a program called ReImagining Works. Working with the Dayton Art Institute, the library would pick a couple of works of art from their permanent collection and ask local artists to reinterpret that artwork into something new for display at each branch. They put out a call for proposals as each library was under construction. I put in a proposal for the Kettering Wilmington-Stroup branch. The artwork I was trying to reimagine was a sculpture called Bold Endeavor by Jon Kuhn. Jon Kuhn takes some of the purest glass and crafts it with precision tools to produce perfect sculptures that fuse the scientific with the artistic. How can a photographer reinterpret a glass and stainless-steel sculpture?
Kettering, Deeds and Delco
The city of Kettering, where this library is located, is named after Charles Kettering, an American inventor. He was credited with the first automobile self-starter, refrigeration, a radio-controlled bomb, and many medical devices. He ran General Motors’ research lab for over 30 years. Edward Deeds was an American industrialist. He was president of the NCR corporation in the early 1900s, founded in Dayton. Deeds gave Kettering his first job out of college at NCR. The two men soon established a strong working relationship that lasted over 50 years. One of the businesses they created was the Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company or DELCO. Delco was a principal automobile parts supplier for GM and had one of its manufacturing plants about ½ a mile from the location of this library. My interpretation comes from the title “Bold Endeavor,” the triangle shape, and the wires holding the glass. I turned the triangle shape upside down with a photograph of the Deeds Barn, an original think tank where he asked engineers to be bold and develop new inventions. I also envisioned this roofline where many thousands of employees had good jobs and could put a roof over their heads for their families. With some research, I found Kettering’s original patent drawings (thank you, Google patents) and used them as another layer, similar to what is going on in Jon Kuhn’s sculpture.
In 2022 another library was being finished on Burkhardt Road which is close to Wright-Patterson Air Force base. They had a display of a Wright Brothers plane in the children’s section of the library. The display was large and meant for children to play on it. The library wanted an image about 4’ x 10’ to go behind the plane. First representing the history of flight in Dayton, what is going on currently at Wright-Patt, and moving into the future. At the bottom, I have Orville Wright flying at Huffman Prairie in 1905. In the middle is a C-17 Globemaster flying today out of Wright-Patt, and on the left is a rocket from NASA taking off into space.
