About the Book
Uninvited Guests is a memoir constructed from a series of portraits, paired with conversations, between the artist, AnnDunne and the person in the portrait. They engage in lively exchanges on a variety of topics, including aging, creativity, adjusting to life's challenges, hopes, dreams, and fears. The conversations reveal the person in the portrait and also reveal the author's interest in exploring what the portrait has to say. Echoing a quasi Gestalt approach that employs active imagination and projection. The artist/author's active imagination of her conversations is a give and take. She asks questions about the portrait, which gives a response. It becomes an intimate exchange of asking, listening and response. The moods and topics change with each encounter. The conversations show audacity, courage, and curiosity, an honesty in reaching for the truth within the Self.
As we get to know the "guest, " we understand Dunne is fearlessly speaking about what supports our development as honest, vulnerable, and compassionate human beings. Dunne's exercise of connecting with the depth psychology archetype clarifies views on aging, the creative process, life's challenges, and social justice. Her concerns for survival, her compassions, and courageous curiosity is apparent. Life changes us. It offers opportunities and choices for development. Ultimately, Dunne maintains curiosity is an essential tool for good enough outcomes. We can do this by continuing to ask out questions throughout life.
About the Author :
Once a nun, stewardess, devoted activist, and wife--always a mother, sister, friend, seeker, and artist--Ann Dunne's life journey began in 1938 in St. Paul, Minnesota. After completing high school, she joined a convent and later ventured into the friendly skies with United Airlines as a stewardess. Despite the demands of family life following her engagement, where she embraced the role of a dedicated mother to five children, Ann remained steadfast in her commitment to advocating for women's rights.
Later in life, she discovered her passions for art, writing, healing, and a Quaker path. Currently residing in Greenbelt, Maryland, Ann continues to weave her experiences and activism into her ongoing artistic pursuits, leaving an indelible mark on the canvas of her multifaceted life.
Review :
James Baldwin once wrote that visible reality hides "a deeper one." The American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and public intellectual who died in 1987, reasoned that happiness and purpose promised humanity through material comfort and scientific authority, but just as easily leaves humanity with too much certainty, too little humility, and too much distance from wonder and surprise. "That's where art and literature may offer comfort."
Ann Dunne's new book of portraits coupled with narratives in support of the images speaks to that sensibility. Her gallery encompasses, the real, the imagined, the unimaginable. And more, much more. It starts with faces - a smiling grandmother, a happy boy, a singer, a somber secretary - each captured in Dunne's own-one-of-a-kind use of line and color.
Close your eyes, and you can half-believe the portraits did not come from a human hand, but via some twist of nature, a play of weathered stone washed season after season to stencil and etch a world not quite of our place. The effect time and again draws attention to the eyes, and especially the mouth of the subjects. It's like they're ready to speak, their facial musculature poised. And the eyes, Velasquez-like, are focused, even riveted on you. Let that sink in for a moment, and the impression is of intense interest - in you, the viewer, the reader - making Dunne's work, if you let it, unfold not as a static one-way presentation, rather, a calling or implied truth of a two-way experience between you and the portrait.
-Ray Lane, the former art critic of Washington Weekly magazine in Washington, D.C
