November 2008 Vol. 27. No. 11

Published by the Humboldt Senior Resource Center in Eureka, California. HSRC is a non-profit community-based organization offering services for senior citizens, multi-generational families and caregivers.

Emmanuel Kennedy: Creativity waits until we¹re ready for it
Senior Safety Net gets last minute axe by the Governor
National Alzheimer¹s Month: Candlelighting honors, memory screenings inform
Area Agency on Aging names Senior Friends
Fortuna Veterans Day event, fundraiser at Ferndale Rep
Area Agency programs are under one roof at 434 Seventh St.
Boomer series on 5 o¹clock news

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Emmanuel Kennedy: Creativity waits until we¹re ready for it
by Barbara Clark

Emmanuel Kennedy works on his drawing of line dancers. Photo by Barbara Clark The image that brought Kennedy back to his art. Drawing by Emmanuel Kennedy

His creativity started again in his 76th year with a dream. Emmanuel Kennedy woke in the middle of the night with an image ‹ a boy sits on a rock, his feet in a body of water. A huge bird flies up to the boy, and he feeds the bird.

Kennedy put the image on paper, simple black ink line drawings with the images colored in. It had been years since he had drawn anything.

As a young man, Kennedy studied art in many towns and worked in many mediums. He felt drawn to a German art teacher in Berkeley ‹ and everything changed.

He took one of his drawings, a mother seated with her child in her lap, to his teacher, and it was ridiculed. ³When I went home that night I was sitting in front of the drawing and had an experience of the third dimension. It was a moment of self-discovery. I understood the spiritual dimension that underlies all renaissance art,² Kennedy tried to explain.

³The source for my art changed from the outer world to the inner world. I couldn¹t do it the old way anymore. Now I could only draw the interior world, what was coming from within me. It was a spiritual awakening.

³I took all of my materials and artwork and threw them away,² he said, with his huge belly laugh. His new medium became that of a child¹s crayons.

Then his love for drawing went underground for years, only to emerge ten years ago with his dream.

Kennedy has lived an unconventional life, choosing to be led from one interest to the next with no large game plan and no major career. As a result of that philosophy, he was drawn to the Subud spiritual community in the sixties. He lived for a time in Arcata, where he met and married his wife, a graduate of HSU. He was instrumental in starting the Subud community in Arcata, which grew to 50 members.

He listened when the spiritual leader suggested he had the soul of a farmer. But his wife disagreed, and the marriage ended. With partners he began one of the first organic beef farms and supplied a new market for bull meat. The farming interlude ended when larger farms began to undersell him.

But adversity didn¹t faze Kennedy, who then went to a Subud community near Los Angeles to work on various tasks. He also spent time in Washington and Oregon.

Other interests led him from place to place until ten years ago. ³Until the image of the bird. It was the middle of the night. Every image was alive, and it started the whole thing again,² he said. Since then he has delighted himself with drawings of the living arms of trees, of young people dancing, napping and necking in parks.

He moved to Eureka six months ago when his name came up on the Silvercrest waiting list. He had been living in Ojai and sharing a $700-a-month room there. He has recorded a program about Subud which airs on Humboldt Access Channel 12. He shrugs off adversity now as always, happily picking up pen and crayons to begin a new drawing.

Barbara Clark is editor of Senior News, seniornews@sbcglobal.net.

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