A Friend to Animals: Martha J. Kennedy

Volunteers are the heart and soul of animal rescue, yet rarely get the same attention as their cute, cuddly causes. To promote creative volunteerism, The Bosque Beast will occasionally profile volunteers who have found clever ways to help animals. Send your suggestions to editor@bosquebeast.com
    
ARTISTS ARE NATURALLY passionate creatures who translate the deeply felt into something that can be seen or heard by others. Yet it was really to take a break from painting her abstract landscapes that Martha Kennedy began doing the artwork that inspired animallovers and has helped countless rescue dogs.
    Now that side hobby—executed mostly via iPad apps like Adobe Ideas and Art Rage—threatens to overtake the work she has been focused on since becoming a full-time painter in 2002. She is at a crossroads, watching the art market continue to decline while contemplating a move out of state for her husband’s career.
    Dog love, meanwhile, has been a constant all her adult life. She fell in love with American Staffordshire Terriers in the mid-1980s and thought about showing them. “I just love the breed. Back then there wasn’t as much hysteria about Pit Bulls,” she recalls. “I didn’t know I’d be walking into this whole thing.”
    After moving to New Mexico from California, she learned about the sad situation for Pit Bulls in Colorado, where the state overturned breed bans in 2004, only to be defeated in court by several communities, including the city of Denver. Owners of Pit Bulls and other banned breeds were suddenly forced to give up their dogs, including the puppy that Kennedy ended up with, Ziggy.
    The Pit/Lab mix had been taken from his home at 3 months, then lived in a shelter for a half year, where he stopped eating. A rescue took him for a year or two before he was finally adopted by Kennedy. “By then I knew about (breed-specific legislation), but really it was when I got him that I started volunteering for the shelter here,” she says.
    She began walking dogs at the Santa Fe animal shelter, networking to get individual dogs adopted, and fostering. She met Angela Stell, president of NMDog, and “just kind of clicked.” Kennedy liked the positive approach taken by Stell, helping people rather than condemning. She created a painting of the rescue’s most famous dog, Junebug, which raised $270 at auction, then followed it with a T-shirt sold online through CafePress.
    Kennedy has since done a T-shirt for the Santa Fe shelter and donates paintings for rescue auctions. Every time she sells a painting, she donates 20 percent to the cause. No matter what she ends up doing, she says, she will not give up her rescue work, and may even break her self-imposed barrier and take up painting animals.
    “As an artist, you’re in a room doing your own thing, and I wanted to give back to the community,” she explains. “And that was the part that spoke to me.” Along the way, she has found that her heart is truly in helping the dogs, and “all this rescue stuff can be an experiment to find my voice—though I don’t think I’ll give up my landscapes.”
    Kennedy advises non-artists to look at anything they enjoy doing, and ask a rescue if they could use help. “From building fences to driving, computer and office work, errands, walking, training— there is probably a rescue that needs those skills. Just contact them and ask.”
    True art, she suggests, is in the giving.