Roy Behrens was leaving Milwaukee as I was beginning graduate school. I missed knowing or working with him - except for the fact that every person I knew at the time - as well as when I started teaching in earnest - used his text as young faculty and adapted all of his assignments to suite their own purposes.
Thus a generation of young people who studied design in Milwaukee (and I suspect elsewhere) have vicariously learned it from him. It was wonderful to run across his written memorial to the writer Guy Davenport on designobserver.com
In it, he writes;"....Bonnie Jean Cox, [who] was DavenportÂs loving companion for nearly forty years, and the person who shaped his memorial at the University of Kentucky on Saturday, May 8, 2005. It lasted about 90 minutes, and both began and ended with beautiful songs by the Shakers. Every force evolves a form, as Mother Lee and Guy would say, so a sweet gum tree was named for him, and a cluster of his closest friends aired their fondest memories of the Hermit of Lexington, as Jonathan Williams once called him, or Dav, as Ezra Pound preferred.
Among those who spoke that day was Erik Anderson Reece, a former student of Davenport who authored A Balance of Quinces (1996), the only book so far about Guy as a visual artist. Another speaker was Wendell Berry, the well-known essayist who taught at the University of Kentucky. He remembered that his and Guy's offices were adjacent. ÂBy walking a few steps and leaning on his doorjamb, and saying a word or two of greeting, I could start Guy decanting whatever happened to be on his mind, said Berry. But my metaphor is off. The flow started not from a decanter but from a stream, and somewhere upstream it was raining."
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