Comfort Me with Diamonds, for I Am Sick of Love: One of the huge, brilliantly original collages that Ardyth Kennelly created later in her life; many were shown in Portland galleries in the 1990s. See more of her artwork here.
Copyright 2014-24 by Sunnycroft Books. All rights reserved.
Page last revised November 25, 2024
Ardyth Kennelly with her collage "The Frame-Up" (Waves and Particles)
Ardyth in about 1994
Ardyth Kennelly Ullman (1912-2005) was a best-selling Oregon author with five novels published in the 1950s, including The Peaceable Kingdom and Good Morning, Young Lady. Sunnycroft Books published her last novel, Variation West, in 2014; a memoir, Bodies Adjacent: Ardyth's Memoir & Egon's Journal, in 2023; and a second, shorter memoir, New York on $5 a day, in 2024.
Ardyth also had a late-life career as a collage artist, creating huge, strikingly imaginative and whimsical pieces. For more on her life, please see this short biography.
For some samples of Ardyth's wonderful writing style, see the blog Ardyth Kennelly Quotation of the Day.
(Why all the pink and red? Ardyth loved bright colors, and these were her favorites!)
The title is too naughty to print. It is the same as the title of the unchaste picture in the oval frame behind the innocent little nipper on the piano stool.
(1ʹ10ʺ high by 1ʹ9ʺ wide)
The Flasher
About indecent exposure on Broadway & Jefferson. He flashes. Obscene clouds pile up. The first and finest peripteral Doric temple splits at the seams. Children squawk and run. The axes of the vision of the eyes of beautiful women light on different objects. Produce bloats like the drowned. Roses turn blue. Jim Morrison in Paris sinks and dies. Black holes open. Immediate filth jumps out of the sugar bowl into the midgets’ fire. Ignite the missile! He comes in through the window onto the furniture, crash, bang, the last movement of the instrumental composition.