By Amelia Tarallo
Hometown Weekly Staff
It’s rare to have an artistic talent recognized as early as your 20s. It’s even rarer to be given the opportunity to collaborate with well-known institutions like the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) while still in college.
Kippy Sage, a Dover native and senior at the Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida, has done just that.
This spring, Sage, along with nine other artists, collaborated with the SAAM to illustrate the lives of ten women artists. Sage’s own work focused on the life of Maria Oakey Dewing, an artist known for her floral depictions, in her comic "A Garden-Thirsty Soul: A Comic About Maria Oakey Dewing".
Ringling students participate in something called the Collaboratory, a program that matches students up with professional artistic experiences. The SAAM reached out to Ringling to hire artists for their "Drawn to Art: Ten Tales of Inspiring Women" project. Students were then invited to submit their portfolios for review. In the end, the Smithsonian picked ten different artists - Dover's Kippy Sage among them - to create comic pieces on some of the women artists housed in their collection.
With ten artists to illustrate ten subjects, Kippy and her fellow artists were each given the option to pick whichever artist spoke to them the most. That subject would become their responsibility. “I picked Maria Oakey Dewing because I’ve always been interested in Victorian-era fashion and history; everything about that era is very interesting. Seeing her work is so beautiful, these floral, lush landscapes. I love floral stuff and nature, so it was perfect for me,” she explains. Sage's own work uses bright colors and bubbly figures to tell a story - a relationship between the two artists can clearly be spotted.
The next steps involved individual meetings with Smithsonian representatives to ensure the student artists were capturing the vision the SAAM had imagined. With the basic details, like size, out of the way, the Smithsonian gave some artists a script. After, artists began planning with the thumbnail stage, just to get a rough idea down. Once that was approved, they moved on to the line art. Sage focused on drawing each panel of her comic separately in its own file, then dropped in the layout she had created.
Prior to the thumbnail stage, Sage also took the time to work on character development. “It was a little tricky with Marie Oakey Dewing, because there’s only one known picture of her in existence that I could find. I did a lot of character exploration and doing sketches … how is she going to look, how am I going to design this character? I also did a lot of research on Victorian fashion. Since her story takes place throughout the 19th century, I wanted to make sure the clothing she was wearing throughout the different points in her life was going to be accurate,” says Sage.
The bittersweet background of Marie Oakey Dewing's story is not lost on Sage. “Her story is a little sad, like the fact that she didn’t really get to reach her full potential. Looking back on that, it’s frustrating. I would have loved to see what she ended up doing. It was really interesting and really sad that she ended up doing a lot of work on her husband’s art. Unfortunately, a lot of the work she did for him didn’t get recognized as it should have been,” says Sage.
Oakey Dewing quietly rendered many of the floral backgrounds in the work of her husband, American artist Thomas Wilmer Dewing. “Despite that, she managed to make a really good name for herself and was known as a maverick for the aesthetic movement. We know in that time period it was very hard for women to get their names out there in art,” explains Sage.
Thankfully, these days, Maria Oakey Dewing's art has been properly recognized for its brilliance and can be spotted in the SAAM.
Sage, meanwhile, is already making a name for herself on the professional art scene. Her work for the "Drawn to Art: Ten Tales of Inspiring Women" project can be found on the SAAM website (www.tiny.cc/dewingsage).
Just months away from graduation, it’s safe to say that Dover's Kippy Sage is on her way to a successful art career.
