Forensic art

When Becky Denny sifts through her thousands of pieces of vintage paper, print patterns and photographs in the drawers of her Crestwood art studio, she said she’s drawn by some sort of magic that always leads to finding exactly what she’s looking for.

“I never get rid of any of it. I will find the negative shape out of the piece of paper that I used 25 years ago that I saved the cut-out from … and I still got it, and then I use it,” she said.

Denny, a Birmingham native and mixed-media artist, said that since she started adding pet portrait commissions last year, the Birmingham community has responded with enthusiasm to her one-of-a-kind style. Denny said her signature art commisions, similar to her pet portraits, combine paint with significant papers, portraits, photographs and shared memories to piece together personal visual stories. 

After Denny graduated from Auburn University in 1982 with a degree in visual arts, she navigated through various roles as a creative professional in the Birmingham area. Throughout the last 40 years, she’s always come back to her love for collecting ephemera and incorporating it into her art. 

“Talent is not magic, that’s something I forget. It’s a skill — painting, art is a skill. Concept is magic, though, and really happens from somewhere in the universe. But from the get-go, I wanted to use photographic images with paint,” Denny said, to give them a glossy, realistic look.

At first, she was insecure about the fact that she was not free-handing pet or people portraits, but eventually she came to understand the importance of the emotional connection surrounding the photographs people would give her to work with.

“They’ve been looking at [the photographs] for years, so why would I ever reinvent what’s not broken?” she said. “I’m reimagining the wheel.”

For both her pet portraits and memory-based commissions, she asks the client to provide her with some details and a short bio about their memory or their pet, then she takes some time to visualize and discern what they are remembering or imagining.

For example, a recent customer commissioned a gift for his parents. He shared his mother’s love of France and that their spaniel is named Bowie because he has one blue eye and one brown eye, much like the artist David Bowie. With that in mind, Denny did a portrait of Bowie in France.

After coming up with her concept, she uses her paper collection, submitted photos and ephemera, along with various paints and fine art mediums, to create narrative art that thematically relates to the person, pet or story she is trying to describe. 

“I’m not really familiar with any other portrait artists who work the way I do,” she said. “There’s a lot of technical challenges.You’re dealing with all ages of paper, and it’s collage, so you’ve got glue and binding mediums over it. Since its mixed media, I work with ink, watercolor, acrylics, color pencils.”

Most people don’t realize they’re giving her the narrative, Denny said, but they are — which she loves being a part of. 

“I immediately start to visualize when people start telling me about their family, their pet. It comes together really fast. … It’s such a gift to me to do this for them,” she said. “I’m just like, ‘Oh gosh, what was it like at your grandmother’s?’ And they’ll just talk and talk, and they’ll say, ‘I just remember how clean the sheets smelled after drying out there by her gardenias.’ They can’t even imagine seeing those memories visualized, and I work details in like that.”

Often, she said, they’re hidden in the background in the form of a word or a picture, or in that client’s case, a clothesline with sheets. 

Denny said she’s always been inherently curious. Years ago, her husband Tim coined the phrase “forensic art,” which she still uses to describe her process. 

Often, the pet portraits tell stories of their owners, she said.

“I dig through your life, and I don’t have to work hard for that stuff to speak to me — it just does. So I think in a lot of ways that makes me a visual writer,” she said. “I mean, it’s just a story, but it’s the very best parts of the story, and it’s contained in one place.”

Denny said she has always been drawn to mid-century imagery, which much of her ephemera and pet portrait art tends to mimic.

“I was born in 1960, so my memories of my mother are exactly everything that was my whole childhood. My mother died when I was 19 and my father a few years later, so I have been the keeper of the ancestral bones since then,” she said. “… I have lived an entire lifetime where now my memories of my mother are my objects because this is all I’ve ever had.”

All the paper memorabilia and the history have become extremely precious to her over the years and have often found their way into a piece of art for her own family members. 

Both corporate and private clients have allowed her to use their ephemera relating to family, history and place to incorporate into a mixed-media creation involving various mediums. Some of her corporate collections include Aliant Bank, Lakeshore Foundation, the Alys Stephens Center and Alabama Humanities Foundation.

Digs Design, which she founded eight years ago with her business partner Zade Denny, is her product development and design studio that creates their own product line as well as private labels and corporate gifts. They also participate in the local market through selling their line of humorous towels and now pet portraits, originally inspired by her beloved bulldog Lou. 

For more information on a commission, go to beckydennyart.com or find her on Instagram @beckydennyart.