Something Dennis Does Well

Something Dennis Does Well

a Carolina Paddler Article

by Alton Chewning

∞ The rascal in me wants to start off with this statement, “Dennis Huntley finally found something he’s good at.”

Some people might say, “Well he’s a pretty good storyteller.”  Others might offer, “He’s not a bad photographer.” A few might observe, “Dennis is a trusted guidance counselor”–whether advising at-risk youth, or screaming to at-risk paddlers, “Hit your damn line.”

Yes, Dennis is all of these. Also a decent mountain climber in his day. By all counts, a very good husband and companion to Ginny. A skier, teacher, psychologist and drill sergeant. Oh, an above-average paddler. His paddling ability is evidenced by his history at the Green Narrows.  He’s ran the Class V-V+ gorge in C-1, kayak and open canoe. Not just once. Many times, continuing into his early 70’s. Not bad.

But what is exciting and worth noting is… he can paint.  And he’s getting better at it.

Dennis has always been a person to try new things.  Mountain climbing was a pursuit he picked up in his twenties. He climbed most of the popular slopes in North Carolina and then tackled western climbs, summiting all the major peaks in the Tetons.

Here is Dennis in 1970, resting at the top of Mt. Moran, after climbing the black dike route. Grand Teton is in the distance.  Another memorable hike was climbing to the top of the Mount St. Helens volcano, after the massive eruption in 1980. Dennis received one of the first permits to climb the volcano. While near the cusp, Dennis remembers watching a helicopter circling inside the crater, filming the unbelievable change the eruption had made to the mountain.

Of course, Dennis paddles. He started to canoe while he was still living in his hometown of Monroe, NC. Malcolm Kennedy supposedly taught him the fundamentals of canoeing. Dennis kept pushing farther. Howard DuBose, the celebrated instructor and purveyor of paddling gear, taught Dennis how to roll a kayak. Dennis recalls they were on the New River in West Virginia.  After learning the technique, Dennis rolled many times that first day, so much so, his wrists and arms were leaden the next day. He switched back to the canoe for the second day of paddling. Dennis likes a challenge and soon he had what people called, “a roll as sweet as a honey bun.”

Speaking of honey, Dennis and Ginny Huntley met in college at East Carolina. Both were learning to work with youth, as future teachers and counselors. They also mutually embraced the outdoor life. Soon they were taking young folks on lengthy winter hiking trips. Some of those fortunate kids are now adults with kids, even grandkids. For years, many of them petitioned the Huntleys to repeat the trips with their offspring.

Tough Love

 For Dennis, childhood was a mixed blessing. Dennis grew up in Monroe, North Carolina, a small town twenty miles from Charlotte.  His dad, James, studied aeronautical engineering at NC State, a new field. This led to him working with Grumman Aircraft on Long Island, NY. Dennis was born just down the street from the Grumman factory. His dad never owned one of the homely but tough Grumman canoes but Dennis would.

James eventually moved back to Monroe and started a machine shop. The business catered to the textile industry and later, to aviation companies. Unfortunately, the prospering company left James with little time to spend with his family.

Helen–Dennis’s mother–had a difficult upbringing. Her parents were homesteading a farm on the South Dakota plains, a difficult place to eke out a living for a family with six kids. Her father died in the winter of 1918, a victim of the Spanish Flu pandemic that killed millions worldwide. The Dakota land was frozen so hard, his body wasn’t buried until spring. Only the charity of neighbors kept the remaining family from starving.

Helen’s grandfather came from his home in Missouri and packed them up. Back east, the family was divided between relatives. Helen landed with an aunt in Rock Hill, SC. The aunt, Minnie, was a biology teacher at the nearby Winthrop College. Helen would spend all of her school years at Winthrop, eventually receiving a degree as an art teacher.

Aunt Minnie gave Helen a home and an education but they never bonded in a mother-daughter way. She was clothed and fed and had a place to sleep but maternal love was missing. When older, Helen took her degree and found a job teaching at an orphanage.

Similarly, Dennis was raised in a stable but distant household. The basic needs of Dennis and his three siblings were met. Their father had very little contact with the children, seeing them only at meals. Otherwise he never did anything with the kids. Their mom, while present, was also emotionally removed. Dennis puts it, “Home was just where you live.”

Young children only know what they see from the people raising them. As Dennis said, “She fed us and clothed us but she was never a mother figure and was never close to any of us. She wasn’t a bad mother. She was limited because of her upbringing.”

Dennis recalls going to a friend’s house when he was 9 or 10 years old and watching his friend’s mother love up on the child. Young Dennis thought, “This is kinky. Unnatural.” Dennis said, “I couldn’t imagine a mother hugging and kissing on her child. I’d never seen that. When you don’t know normal and you see something that is normal, it seems weird.”

Even with an artistic mother, as a child, Dennis never drew or painted with her. She sometimes worked as a teacher but never held a regular job, having four children to raise. She was the person who put meals on the table, who kept the household functioning.

Children in small towns across the South had more personal freedom at this time. Maybe the parents were naive or trusting. Maybe the risks of the world were fewer than today. Without parental involvment, the Huntley kids were free to roam.  The feral kids became tough, wily and highly independent. They were able to take care of themselves in most situations but were not the best in cooperating with others.

Schooling

Dennis describes his first day at school. His mom drove him to school and enrolled him. Dennis was, “wild as hell” and before the first lunch break he had a spanking. Dennis recalls, “The class had a little raised stage. The teacher pulls you up on this stage, right in front of everybody, and beats hell out of you with a big-ass paddle. I knew I had to learn to keep my mouth shut.”

After this first day of school, Dennis waited outside for his mom to pick him up. It was a Monroe city school with no bus service. Students either walked or mothers and fathers came to get their kids. Dennis sat on the school steps and waited and waited. Finally the principal came out, heading to his car. He saw Dennis and told him, “I called your mom and she said for you to walk home.”

Dennis had never walked this far from home or in this neighborhood. While finding his way home, he had to pass through a big municipal cemetery, weaving among the tombstones, losing his way and retracing his steps. When he finally reached home, he ran up to his mother and said, “Why didn’t you come and get me?” She was putting supper on the table and stopped to look at him, “What for? You made it home fine.” She never came to the school after that first morning. Dennis said, “I would call it love, but I would call it tough love.”

The Start of Art

Dennis didn’t learn art as a child from his mother but he did try drawing and painting. Maybe he saw his mother painting at times or saw the pieces she did.

Dennis is gifted in many ways. Does a person come blessed with particular skills or is it something an individual learns and develops?  The nature versus nurture question. While Dennis says he never painted with his mother, he does attribute one of his gifts to his mother. His very special visual memory.

I first met Dennis at his home in Shelby. Ginny greeted me and said Dennis was in the basement, painting. The basement was nothing fancy, not an artist’s garret, or a canvas-draped hall, just a simple basement full of the standard residue of life. Dennis was seated and bent over a small canvas, painting. He greeted me but his focus was on the painting. He likes to use a photograph as a starting point for his painting. Turns out this approach is a bit perplexing. Dennis has a remarkable memory, especially for visual details. Why does he need a photograph, one he took, to remind him of a scene? Particularly a scene he will shape considerably to bring about a pleasing pictorial result.

The Gift

There is disagreement among scientists about the existence of “photographic memory.” The ability to accurately recall the exact visual details of a scene, perhaps glimpsed fleetingly, like the view at the top of a rapid, seen for a second before the bow drops.

Here is an observation offered on the Scientific American website:

“The intuituve notion of a “photographic” memory, is that it is just like a photograph: you can retrieve it from your memory at will and examine it in detail, zooming in on different parts. But a true photographic memory in this sense has never been proved to exist.

Most of us do have a kind of photographic memory, in that most people’s memory for visual material is much better and more detailed than our recall of many other kinds of stimuli. For instance, most of us remember a face more easily than the name associated with that face. But this isn’t really a photographic memory; it just shows us the normal difference between types of memory.”

There are many types of memory. A cousin of mine has no recall of faces. It’s called prosopagnosia, or “face blindness.” Persons with prosopagnosia can forget their spouse’s face or even their own. Otherwise, the afflicted person functions normally. The actor, Brad Pitt, is said to have prosopagnosia, which sometimes leads to him appearing aloof or distracted in groups. My cousin says he has to be alert to clues when a new person walks into a room.

So, while Dennis may not have textbook “photographic memory” he certainly does have an enhanced “river-feature awareness.”  Although he admits his memory has suffered with age, in his prime he could run a river once and remember the lines. He could drive to a place once on a twisting patchwork of mountain roads and remember the way. Paddling friends give verifying anecdotal evidence of this. “If Dennis says you need to be four inches off this rock at the top of the drop, then believe him.” Linville Gorge is a maze of rapid-fire turns, some directions leading to nasty sieves. Follow Dennis. He knows the way.

Scientific American points out, “These memories seem to result from a combination of innate abilities, combined with zealous study and familiarity with the material, such as the Bible or fine art.”  It is safe to say Dennis has made a zealous study of hitting the right lines on a river yet he had this gift as a youngster.

When did it first come to his attention? Dennis tells a story.

“When I was ten years old I wanted to get contact lenses. Contacts were a new thing. I was a smart kid and had read about it. My vision was so bad I was basically legally blind. I told my dad I wanted to have contact lenses. He said, ‘You’re too young. You can’t have them.’  He probably thought I was too young to manage them and he was probably right. But anyway, he said, ‘If you really want them, you go out and earn your own money and buy them yourself. You’re on your own.’  That’s the way my family was.

I said okay, I had a bicycle so I rode downtown to the newspaper office. I knew newspaper boys made some money. I told the newspaper people I wanted a job and they said, ‘Sure.’  I put a big basket on my bicycle, an old timey one with fat tires. I had to ride four miles to get to the office and another four or five to deliver my route and then ride home. It was all good.

The first day I showed up for work, the paper guy put me in his car and took me around and threw newspapers out at the houses I was supposed to deliver to.  We got through with the route, 150 houses or so, and he said, “Now we’ll have to do this for a week or so until you get to know the route.”  I said, “You don’t have to do that, I know the route already.” He looked at me like, you little piece of s**t. And he said, ‘we’ll just see.’  I think he was angry with me. He rode me around the same streets and I had to point out the directions to turn and point to every single house and, of course, I got every house right and every single turn right.  Started work the next day.

That was the first time I had to demonstrate to someone else the gift. It didn’t occur to me it was a gift. When I started paddling it was a lot different then because everyone wanted to paddle with me because if I paddled a river one time, I knew it perfectly. Every time I went down the river I was the leader because I knew the lines perfectly. Some people have to run a river twenty times before they get to know it. Especially with something complicated like Watauga Gorge or Linville Gorge.”

If Dennis can remember the rock he sat on during lunch two years before on his first descent why can’t he remember the scene well enough to paint it?  Some visual memory is called eidetic, meaning a person has a distinct visual “projection” of an object or point within a view. The recall, the after-image, is tied with this specific object, not all the other visual information taken in at the setting. For instance, Dennis doesn’t automatically remember the weather when he was first on a river. He doesn’t remember the hundreds of trips he’s taken and who was with him. He does remember the way.

While Dennis’s mother never taught him how to paint, he does attribute his visual memory to her. Dennis said, “When I learned to read for example, no one ever taught me phonetics. I learned to read by memorizing what a word looked like and what it stood for. When I would see a word, I would see an image. So, when I would read a book, it would unfold in my brain like the most vividly colored movie, more than a real movie, more than one could be. I’d read a book and then go to see the movie of it and I’d be really disappointed because my visual images of the book were much more vivid. The color was better and everything was more brilliant. It’s hard to explain. Everything I did was visual. I never learned phonetics. I did learn enough phonetics to be able to sound out a word. You have to be able to sound out a word to be able to read aloud. Before I learned to read aloud, I was reading visually.

Southpaw

Dennis attributes this special skill in part to his being left-handed. Dennis: “When you’re left-handed you tend to be more of a visual person than a right-handed person, because when a right-handed person thinks or speaks they use the left side of the brain for those cognitive processes. A left-handed person uses more of the right side of the brain. A right-handed person tends to be more of a structured, cognitive indiviual and a left-handed person tends to be more of a visual, intuitive person that thinks in a different kind of way.”

There are certainly many creative southpaws in history:  Aristotle, Einstein, Napoleon Buonaparte, Bill Gates, Babe Ruth, Jimi Hendrix, the list goes on. However there is no scientific evidence of left-handers, on a whole, being more creative than righties.

When Dennis is painting a scene he’s sometimes focusing narrowly on a specific point–a paddler or an object–but in other of his paintings, the setting, the larger view is just as important as the central subject.

Of course, Dennis does many paintings from photographs given to him by others. Situations where he was not the primary observor of an event. Oftentimes a photo will stimulate Huntley to do different versions of the same scene, highlighting one aspect over another. Most of us need notes to remember what groceries to pick up at the store. Let’s face it, regardless of Dennis Huntley’s superpower, and the scientific basis for it, we are all human. Memory, like life, is tenuous and passing. A lot of water falling over the drop.

Back in the Huntley basement, I watch Dennis, wondering what his subject is. This was my first time meeting Dennis in person. I didn’t know him well enough to stand over his shoulder watching. Turns out, my discretion was appropriate. Dennis does not like people watching him work. Maybe in some circumstances he’s welcoming but I’ve had him tell me to not take photos of his unfinished work.

While Dennis didn’t learn to paint from his mother, he does credit her with some of his innate gifts: the special memory, an intuitive sense of beauty, left-handedness. Dennis built upon his gifts, he nurtured what nature gave to him.

After high school, Dennis was floundering about, trying to decide what to do. He took art classes at Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte. Finally he decided to enroll at East Carolina University. Paying his own way, he opted to take as many classes as allowed, since 22 course hours cost the same as 12. The plan was going well but then the military lottery system was started.

The Vietnam War was underway. In 1969, in order to address inequalities in deferments given, a military lottery system was enacted. Men of ages 18 to 26 had their birth dates drawn and assigned a number. Lower numbers meant a greater likelihood of being called to enlist.

Dennis’s number was fairly low and he didn’t like his odds. A letter from his draft board said he could be called in several months, during the college semester. Rather than risk losing his semester’s tuition, Dennis chose to take the semester off and get a job until the draft board called.

Back home in Monroe, Dennis landed a high paying job. But it was in hellish conditions. He would work third shift, graveyard, standing at a 30 ft. behemoth of a punch machine. Every few minutes the punch would crash down, making a sound “like dynamite exploding.” Safety wires were attached to his hands to jerk them back from under the punch in case he forgot. He was required to squirt a heavy oil continuously on the machine and the metal being cut. This oil splashed all over him and created a haze in the air. He spent the night shift standing at the machine, his dangerous master, covered in oil and flinching at explosions of metal on metal. Dennis lasted a week.

After quitting the factory job, Dennis drove to Charlotte and visited Paradis Studio. The company was a commercial art and printing business, perhaps the largest in town. Dennis went in and asked to see the manager. The manager did see him and Dennis said he was looking for a job for the semester. The manager pointed out Dennis had, “no experience, no reputation, no references–a job was out of the question.”

Dennis volunteered to work for free until they decided he was worth paying minimum wage. He needed a job. Dennis recalls, “The manager set me down and started me drawing these line drawings for the Charlotte telephone directory. The Yellow Pages.  He did okay and the manager hired him.

Dennis enjoyed making drawings for the Yellow Pages. This was before the internet so if someone needed a service, they would “Let their fingers do the walking.” He did hundreds of simple black and white line drawings for businesses. Women getting hairdos. Wrecker trucks with telephone numbers on them.

Dennis described the change  in work conditions from the third shift punch machine to the drawing room, “I’m sitting there in this air conditioned office with the latest rock music playing, working around a bunch of young ladies–the most pleasant environment you could think of. I enjoyed the s**t out of myself for the rest of the term. Drew one thing after another all day long for weeks on end.”

The semester passed without Dennis being called into the army. He returned to East Carolina and there met Ginny.  School was a full time occupation and he did no more art for many years.

Return to Art

After college Ginny and Dennis married and moved to Albemarle in Stanly County. They would be there for eight years, Ginny teaching in public schools and Dennis working as a counselor and do-all at the new, half-finished Stanly Community College.  This was followed years later by further graduate studies and a move to Troy in Montgomery County.

Ginny wanted to do some form of art so she took an art course. This led to painting t-shirts with acrylics. Dennis thought this looked like fun and he took it up too. Ginny quickly realized Dennis had more skill and experience and she promptly surrendered the field.

Dennis usually plunges head-first into new hobbies so soon he was filling all their closets and drawers with painted t-shirts. He still has several of them.

About this time, life took a turn. Helen, mother of Dennis, broke her hip. Ginny and Dennis brought her to live with them at their new home in Shelby. Dennis went from having a very distant mother to having a very present one. He admitted, “She about drove us crazy.” To keep Helen occupied, Dennis started painting gourds with her.

They’d go out in the countryside and return with a truckload of gourds. Then it was paintings and making pottery. The wall space was filling. Dennis, “She painted our chairs, stools, cabinets.” We were getting nervous. Finally she healed enough to return home.

It’s interesting to see Helen’s paintings alongside the work of Dennis.  Dennis uses bold colors, and strong, representational forms. His compositions are dramatic, full of movement. Helen shows many of the same tendencies in  her pottery and acrylic painting, but her watercolors are especially muted and dreamy.

Helen’s paintings cover many walls in Dennis and Ginny”s house.  Her pottery fills shelves.

Artistic Rebirth

Dennis went with a friend on trips to New England on a sailing ship called the Yankee Clipper. They frequently toured the Maine coast and Dennis would do paintings of lighthouses. While touring galleries on the coast, Dennis was struck with the realization he should be doing paintings, not gourds or t-shirts.

This new dedication to serious painting led him to watercolors. Dennis explains, “I chose water color because it’s transportable. You can carry a notebook and watercolors wherever you go. He did paintngs while on the Grand Canyon.

In fact if you were one of the lucky people on the trip, you may have received one of the watercolors. Or one of the friends back home who found a Huntley postcard in the mailbox, painted in the canyon and hauled out by mule.

What Dennis Paints

Lately his work is getting more refined and grander in presentation. Dennis said, “I’ve been doing 4′ x 3′ paintings. It’s bigger than you would typically want in your home.”

Dennis has always given away much of his artwork. Sometimes friends will ask him to do a painting for them. He’s usually happy to oblige, Either he has a photo of them from a river trip or they offer a photo to use as a guideline. Dennis says, “I have lots of horrible photos sent to me. Sometimes I can’t do it. Or it might not be worth doing.

Some subject matter I enjoyed painting, I no longer do. A good example is children. I love to do people and portraits but you know if you’re giving away a painting, or selling a painting, unless its going to family, other people don’t want to see the person.  If it’s a gallery, you have to show the gallery written permission from the parents. Even then they don’t like paintings of children. I get sour looks whenever I have a painting of a child I want to display.”

It’s forced me to get into landscape more and I hated landscape painting  at first. But after you do it, it’s like anything, after you get good at it you start to enjoy it. Drudgery becomes fun.

Paddling Painting

Dennis is a paddler and many of his friends are paddlers. He’s done many paintings of friends. Those paintings are often prized possessions of the subjects, now  turned owners.

Ginny Huntley explains it this way, “After Dennis retired in 2002, he put paint brush to canvas to put in pictures his favorite rapids on the rivers he loved to paddle. His pictures show the exhilaration and challenge of white water paddling. His works hangs in several businesses and many homes of paddlers.”

For many paddlers, the paintings by Dennis become a personal shrine. They often reflect a moment when the paddler made a momentous run, a first descent, a rite of passage. Through his paintings, Dennis celebrates this joy and the range of paddlers who take to whitewater.

Wil Rasmussen never felt comfortable in a kayak–too confining. Dennis tutored the teen-ager in paddling an open whitewater canoe, learning to roll. Later Dennis gave Wil his Atom C-1. Wil quickly adapted to the Atom and Dennis snapped a photo of him on Ocoee. A month later Dennis gave him a painting.

Eric Condrey said, “Dennis would go out of his way to get a good photograph. Often hopping out  in some sketchy place to get a good angle.”

The good photo becomes the better painting, a moment captured and polished to a timeless memory.

Sometimes it’s a painting to honor a friend. Dennis gave this painting to Paul Ferguson, a four-term president of the CCC. Dennis praised Paul’s “calm, kind, unemotional behavior on and off the river.” This finely crafted painting was based on a photo by another ex-president, Larry Ausley.

Sometimes the painting is a self portrait. Or as Ginny put it, “a painting to remember a rapid.” Ginny provided many of these Dennis-in-action photos as did others like Sarah Ruhlen and Eric Condrey.

A Generous Nature

Generosity has always been a part of the painting legacy of Dennis. Rarely does a painting stay with him. The paintings tend to move around. This one was made of a street scene outside Shelby Cafe, a favorite haunt of Ginny and Dennis. This work hung inside the Cafe for many years until Dennis gave it to someone else.

The replacement painting is another crowd favorite. Beth is a popular waitress at the cafe and here Milly, her granddaughter, takes her place.

As Dennis continues to paint well and frequently, many people are starting to take notice.  Friends of friends send him photos and ask for paintings of family or pets. As Dennis says jokingly, “I get a lot of photos of dead dogs. I mean pets who have died.” Sometimes he is able to accomodate but other times it seems a chore.  Dennis corrects, “It’s something I love to do. It’s not like I’m at the old punch machine again. It’s work, but it’s enjoyable work.”

His enjoyable work has led to a broader audience. Friends and artists have encouraged him to put examples of his work in galleries. He’s doing larger works, His paintings are selling. Some as commissioned work, others he’s proud of and puts out to show. Dennis explains when an artist shows works in a gallery, they are required to put a price tag on it. He’s asked around for appropriate prices to charge. Usually he fixes a price less than the suggested numbers. Even so, a recent painting brought $2000.

Questions considered

This comes back now to our two questions.  Why does Dennis like to use photographs as guides, when he has such excellent visual memory? And, is Dennis getting better at painting?

We’ve alluded to why Dennis uses photos. It helps to have a photo to give some of the background detail, the time of day, the angle and texture of light, certain textures in the setting. Also, many of the paintings Dennis does are not of subjects he’s seen with his own eyes. It may be a moment on a river, or a pet long ago passed. In cases like these, particularly with animate creatures, he likes to have a selection of photos. Often, a single photo is not very good. Composition is poor. Lighting is murky. Color is off.  A selection gives him a better chance of cobbling something together, a background from one, the subject’s posture in another. Often, this compilation approach results in a striking painting.

Helen, the mother of Dennis, painted a lot of cats, one of her favorite subjects. Cats found their way into her pottery too. Sometimes whimsical, sometime reflective.

Dennis was asked to paint a beloved cat who had passed on. Again, he was given a handful of photos.

If I had any doubts about Dennis getting better this White Cat settles it.

Or his new landscapes, his handling of texture and light.

Favorites 

We’re back in the basement with Dennis. He’s putting the finishing touches on the painting he’s been doing as we talk. He asks me to take a look.

 

It’s a simple fall scene, dominated by a red maple in full autumn glory, offset by a green swath of grass and a blue sky with puffy clouds. He shows me the photograph he used as a source.

His painting has cleaned up the distracting branches and trees, strengthened the maple’s color, added blue sky and a glowing indirect sunlight.  It’s what our minds do when we want to remember a good time, a perfect setting.  We recall and enhance the good points of the story;  we blot out the distracting, ugly moments and the ones just plain dull and gray.

The painting is beautiful, yet it’s what Dennis would call a quickie. Walking around his house, I see other versions of this scene. It’s a welcome gift to a new friend, a post card from the artist’s canyon of memories. I placed it in my bedroom and my eyes rest on it as I awake.

I asked Dennis if he had a favorite photo. He didn’t respond. Days later, he sent me a photo of this painting.  It resides in his bathroom, where he’s able to study it several times a day. A fitting place for a favorite.

The painting is based on a photo taken at dawn on a fall day at North Lake in Shelby. For me, it’s a study in planes and textures, with small but exuberant flashes of color.  The eye is grabbed by the amber tree on the right but then seduced by the siena treetop in the center, and the bits of scarlet in the foreground. The painting is beguiling. The directly seen trees on the far shore are muted and impressionistic. The mirror of the same trees in the foreground water are clear, distinct. A reality not found in seeing but in reflection, a memory.