In the Studio with Kipp Normand

If you’ve been watching the weather on WTHR with Weatherman Chuck Lofton, you’ve probably noticed the fabulous local art in the background. Last week, a piece called “We Looked Toward the Heavens from Whence Cometh Our Help” by artist Kipp Normand caught a lot of your eyes. We got the lowdown from Kipp about the piece and think you will enjoy hearing it’s history!

We Looked Toward the Heavens from Whence Cometh Our Help, Kipp Normand, Mixed Media, $500.

The piece I made is a collage made with vintage blueprint paper and a photograph from a 1930s issue of the Farm Journal....I have drawn and written over the entire surface with chalk, pastel, ink and paint so the whole thing is probably best described as Mixed Media (Look at me trying new things!)

The image is inspired by a vivid memory from my childhood in Detroit. By the late 1960s that once beautiful city was the most maligned place in the nation.  Often the butt of jokes about terrible places to live (I recall a particularly mean-spirited sketch one Saturday night on the Laugh-In show. Everyone laughed in the studio audience, but my family sat grimly in the TV room of our 1920s colonial revival house
with Florida room and spacious detached garage. We weren't laughing. No one in Detroit was laughing. All my father ever talked about was getting the hell out of that city, but my parents bought our fancy house just 2 years before the riot and there was no way they would be able to break even. (They eventually sold that house in 1986 for $18,000 - less than half of what they paid for it in 1965.)

All this is by way of introduction to the dramatic event that took place just before Easter in the spring of 1968. Everyone in Detroit was tense and one day the tornado sirens sounded the alarm and the radio announcer told us all to get down to the basement. This one was serious, My parents went around partially opening some windows and gathering me and my slightly older brother along with the dog and cat and we all went down to the basement...just as we had done the summer
before when we could see the great clouds of smoke from the burning neighborhoods to the east of us. The sky turned a strange color and I was sure that the end was near. I was a melodramatic little boy and I tore myself away from our safe place next to the furnace, ran up the stairs and beat my hands against the dining room windows. I called out to God to send the tornado down and destroy Detroit. Just then I saw the trees whip into a frenzy and a garage across the street blew up into the air just like Dorothy's house in the Wizard of Oz. That vision sent me screaming back to the basement.  I will never forget that moment. Nature is wild and often violent.

Interested in the piece? Please contact, Sarah Peacock at speacock@harrisoncenter.org.

The piece with WTHR Weatherman, Chuck Lofton