Recollections 54 The Art of David Tripp

“Finding the Seam,” watercolor

His final camping trip of the summer went farther afield, this time to a ghost town called Seney in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, only fifteen miles from the chilly shores of Lake Superior. The trip gave him the background for “Big Two-Hearted River” . . .

Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, by Carlos Baker

Re-reading the Hemingway biography anchored this morning’s executive time. I read this work in its entirety while I was still a teacher, checking it out of our high school library. After finishing, I later found a first edition in a used book store, picking it up for $20. I am now reading my own copy, digesting virtually every paragraph. With spring approaching, I’m filled with all the delicious memories of fly-fishing north of here. The watercolor above I created, using a photo of me fishing the South Fork of the Rio Grande in southwestern Colorado. This is one of my favorite spots on earth, and I long for a return to that lovely place whenever possible. The watercolor below recalls camping trips with my Missouri friend Wayne White, one of the characters in the Turvey’s Corner novel I’ve been writing for years. I feel the enthusiasm Hemingway knew about writing short stories and novels from his meaningful moments in life, and I have been doing that for years. The quote from the above story introduces the events that created his short story “Big Two-Hearted River” which I’ve read more times than I can count. Every time I step into the South Fork stream, I feel like I am Nick Adams.

“Hank and Randy” watercolor

Yesterday’s trip to Granbury set off an explosion of new aspirations I feel about the days ahead, and I’ll be writing soon about them. For now, I will just say that it’s been a long time since the winds of inspiration have stirred my imagination like the present. I’m grateful to be alive and still possess the strength to pursue things that really matter.

Thanks for reading.

“Crosby’s Dream”

I am pleased to announce that my watercolor “Crosby’s Dream,” at this writing, is on its way to Igo’s Pour Decisions, a lovely wine, beer & coffee bar on Granbury’s town square (130 N. Crockett St.). I began this painting as a tribute to David Crosby, the day I learned of his death. He was the one who lit a fire under me to play acoustic guitar when I first heard the first CSN album in 1969. After my watercolor demo last week at the Lake Granbury Art Association, I walked to this establishment with Gloria Hood (the curator of the show I’m included in now at Barons Creek Winery) for a glass of wine & business chat. While seated there, one of the proprietors recognized me from a Granbury show a couple of years back, and told me she still remembers “the Crosby, Stills & Nash watercolor” which then was on display in the show’s storefront window. A few minutes later, we agreed that I would display it here in Igo’s Pour Decisions, with a $500 price tag on it for any interested buyer. The painting has been great company to me the past few years, and it has traveled to plenty of shows and festivals. I finally took it out of circulation and it has been here in our home. Until now.

Igo’s Pour Decisions, 120 N. Crockett Street, Granbury

Thanks for reading.

I have been promising myself to draw more in recent weeks. Yesterday I finally began. I drew this 8 x 10″ rendering of my “brand” that I’ve used for several years now for my “Recollections 54” business. For years I’ve heard other artists discussing the idea of “building your brand.” I admit I still don’t know fully what this entails, but have decided to take another look at it. I have found little help so far on the subject with Youtube videos. Maybe I should go to the Barnes & Noble Store’s business section to see what is written about branding?

My brand is based on a painting I did of the photograph that now appears on the header of my blog. I took the selfie years ago when residing in an old store that my friends purchased and moved to their ranch. I titled the painting “Heidegger’s Hut” because I was always fond of the stories of philosopher Martin Heidegger writing all his major publications in a cabin he had built in the Black Forest outside the village of Todtnauberg. My life as an artist, now especially retired from the classroom, has been one of sweet thoughtful solitude, like what I knew in the days spent in Heidegger’s Hut.

So far, all I’ve done with my brand is place it on my Facebook page, and feature it on business cards, merchant bags used at art festivals, and a vinyl sign that adorns my festival booth. I expect I’ll soon get some more ideas as I research this subject about “building your brand.”

I have never been sure how to use a visual to depict the kind of persona I wish to project. I regard myself as a thinking artist, or artist writer, or artist scholar. I’m still not sure really how to describe this. I don’t want to be regarded as merely talented, or as an artisan or craftsman. Like Edward Hopper, I always hoped my paintings would depict something thoughtful or engaging or nostalgic, not just “pretty.”

I’m currently re-reading Carlos Baker’s Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. I think this is one of several reasons lately that I have been thinking about this issue of building a brand. We’ll see how it goes . . .

Thanks for reading.

The most stimulating moment I know, standing in a mountain stream, is that fleeting glimpse from the corner of my eye of a brown trout sipping a fly off the surface of the water and vanishing again. That magic moment of ecstasy outshines the entire morning in the stream. This is what came to mind early this morning while reading Robert Richardson’s Emerson: The Mind on Fire:

He was now trying to capture not just major conclusions and insights, but the slightest, most evanescent hints and glimmers that rise to the surface of his mind and then as quickly sank from sight: “for the best part . . . of every mind is not that which [a person] knows, but that which hovers in gleams, suggestions, tantalizing unpossessed before him.“

For years now, in my journals, I note that they are very fragmentary as I jot down quotes and summaries from books I read or interviews I watch on TV or Youtube. When I am ready to write more of an essay, I return to the fragments and weave them into a piece that might find its way to the blog or be tucked into yet another file on my external hard drive. My real joy in journaling consists in recording the snippets of ideas that come and go throughout each day. Likewise in the trout stream, my real pleasure stems from watching trout break the surface or glide deep below it, rather than how many fish I manage to catch and lead into the net.

Emerson’s journals show that for years he fished along the edges of consciousness, eager to note down the smallest fresh suggestion or hint of a suggestion. . . . These were all struggles to forestall and cheat the repressive processes of the mind, to snatch and write down everything that reached the surface of consciousness.

Thanks for reading. I’m posting a link to something I wrote about journaling seven years ago. My blog pointed this entry out to me this morning. After reading it, I decided I wanted to write something again about the journal experience I’ve enjoyed for so long.

“When Journaling Was More Magical, February 15, 2019

Soon [Robert] Henri’s studio at 806 Walnut Street, in the heart of downtown Philadelphia, became the gathering place for a group that included George Luks and Everett Shinn, fellow artist-reporters with Glackens and Sloan on the Philadelphia Press. At these gatherings, music, literature, and above all, art were discussed–away from the stifling confines of the Academy. . . . Henri’s studio provided the kind of forum for ideas European artists could find in cafes, but which was rare in America.

Barbara Rose, American Art Since 1900

Writing in 1948, the year after A Streetcar Named Desire opened on Broadway, Tennessee Williams, who was a frequent visitor to Provincetown, where [Hans] Hofmann ran his school in the summer, described Hofmann as a “bold and clear-headed man who paints as if he understood Euclid, Galileo and Einstein, and as if his vision included the constellation of Hercules toward which our sun drifts.“

Jed Perl, New Art City: Manhattan at Mid-Century

Today was a restorative day. I pored over books in the quiet of Studio Eidolons, with no appointments to invade my Executive Time. After hours of reading and taking sketchy notes from Marshall McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media, followed by William Powers’s chapter on McLuhan in his Hamlet’s Blackberry, I returned to my reading of twentieth-century American art in a pair of books quoted above. The transition was not accidental. After absorbing McLuhan’s intriguing style of presenting ideas, which is not linear, but described as “circular” or “mosaic,” I decided I wanted to re-examine a pair of art teachers who also were just as attractive as they were unorthodox in their teachings.

At the opening of the twentieth century, and then at the mid-point, Henri and Hofmann respectively inspired a circle of art students instrumental in igniting major art movements in their time that we still experience to this day. I have thoroughly enjoyed Henri’s book The Art Spirit, reading it many times. He was a real firebrand, reading to his students in his studio apartment from Emerson, Whitman, Ibsen, Chekhov and Tolstoy.

Hofmann would hold up before his students a sheet of plain-as-plain-can-be paper and announce in that crazily accented English of his that “within its confines is the complete creative message.” . . . What Hofmann was saying was that when you drew a line on a piece of paper, you were creating a world. “Pictorial life,” Hofmann asserted, “is not imitated life; it is, on the contrary, a created reality based on the inherent life within every medium of expression. We have only to awaken it.”

Reading these texts makes me ache once again to find a tribe where we can exchange our art and literary ideas. I’m happy that I joined Lake Granbury Art Association and look forward to forging some connections with that body of enthusiasts. I only had an hour to share last Monday at my demo. After decades of absorbing ideas from art, literature, and philosophy, I am ready once again to sit in some conversational circles and explore these notions with kindred spirits.

Thanks for reading.

We mustn’t forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of intellectuals.

Saul Bellow, Herzog

My Journals

I felt, before the malaise of settlement crept over me, that I should reopen those notebooks.  I should set down on paper a resume of the ideas, quotations and encounters which had amused and obsessed me; and which I hoped would shed light on what is, for me, the question of questions: the nature of human restlessness.

Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines, quoted in David Sax, The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter.

I realize now in my later years that since childhood I have been narrating my life throughout most days. Perhaps it was because my early childhood was spent playing alone, living apart from neighborhoods and having no siblings until I was four years old. I did not have a social life until I started school, and then stayed mostly to myself.

This internal narrative never ceased, and finally in 1986, I decided to keep a journal. Not a diary. But a serious journal of ideas, such as what I thought writers kept, writers like Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, and Twain. 

The journal has grown to over 300 volumes. They just kept taking up more shelves in my bookcases.  Yesterday, after reading the quote posted above, I decided it was time to comb through these and write a narrative of the last forty years of my life. Soon after I retired, I picked up a copy of Julia Cameron’s It’s Never Too Late to Begin Again, an excellent book for those in their senior years. In the book, she encouraged the readers to write their memoirs. I have written many, many chapters of my memoir, chapters now saved on computer files. But this new approach with my journals now allows me to write a chronological memoir, beginning with 1987, a pivotal year in my adult life.

I’m still on a natural high from last night’s demo I gave at the Lake Granbury Art Association. This group impressed me so much by what they have going on that I joined and am looking forward to having a “tribe” once again from whom I can draw inspiration and encouragement. My workshop with this group has been moved to March 27-28. Once we finish on the 28th, I’ll walk over to the Barons Creek Vineyards where a show that I am in will be having their reception.

As I close, I wanted to post my newly hung exhibit in Arlington’s Studio 48 at 4720 S. Cooper Street in Gracie Lane Boutiques.

Thanks for reading.

Just finished an enjoyable night doing a watercolor demonstration for the Lake Granbury Art Association. My watercolor workshop with them has been moved to March 27-28. When it finishes, I will go over to the square for the reception of my art show at Barons Creek Vineyards.

I will have more to say about all of this tomorrow.

Thanks for reading.

The Club was always misunderstood. We didn’t want to have anything to do with art. We just wanted to get a loft, instead of sitting in those goddamned cafeterias.

Willem de Kooning in an interview with James T. Valliere in 1967

This morning’s executive time featured a swan dive into de Kooning: An American Master, chapter 21 titled “The Club.” Reading of the Eighth Street Club in Greenwich Village in 1949 and the beginnings of the abstract expressionist movement reminded me of the days when I gathered weekly with five other creatives at La Madeleine in north Arlington years ago. Unlike de Kooning’s sentiment expressed above, we purposely gathered to discuss art intensely–our own dreams, possible networking, upcoming festivals requesting participation, etc. I’ll never know if I provided much benefit for them, but they certainly energized me, recharging my battery weekly, and always giving me a sense of direction. After our meetings, I was always ready to return home to paint the next picture or read the next book or art magazine. We participated in some shows together. Three of them placed work in my Gallery at Redlands. Though that chapter has closed, this tribe will remain a significant chapter in my personal history, and they created a Greenwich Village that I was proud to inhabit.

Currently without a tribe, I’m satisfied that solitary studio work has yielded good days, and I’m happy to move into the social realm of art beginning Monday night with my demo before the Lake Granbury Art Association, followed by other workshops, exhibits and festivals extending till the end of April. Following that, I will resume my quest for a tribe. I would love weekly meetings with kindred spirits wishing to share and discuss art and ideas. I miss those days.

I regret cutting this blog short, but I’m consumed with my talking points, handouts, and specific plans for Monday night’s event. If you are in the area, I would love to see you Monday night at 7:00 at the Shanley House Gallery, 224 N. Travis Street, Granbury.

Thanks for reading.

“The Lafayette” at 30 East 9th Street, which replaced 39 East 8th Street in 1955.

I copied the above image from the blog of Village Preservation, a leader in preserving the architectural heritage and cultural history of Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo. On April 3, 2019, Louisa Winchell authored “When ‘the Club’ Ruled the Art World from East 8th Street.” What led me on this search was my re-reading of de Kooning: An American Master, by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. It was a privilege to meet these authors when they gave a public lecture at the Fort Worth Modern Art Museum. They signed my purchased copy.

All of this reading is in preparation for a series of art events coming up that have my imagination buzzing over this notion of a New Byzantium where I now live and interact with a growing number of enthusiastic artists. My dream of a New Byzantium was fueled by poet William Butler Yeats’s testimony of why he chose this historic city for his magnificent poem “Sailing to Byzantium.” I am also inspired by my readings in art history over the past five decades. Today I’ve been re-reading a number of texts covering the birth of Abstract Expressionism in Greenwich Village during the 1940s and 50s.

What warms my blood are the accounts of a number of artists who found ways to balance their solitude in the studio with time spent in quality conversations with other creative spirits–artists, musicians, poets, playwrights, and the like. Reading about gatherings at the Cedar Bar, the Eighth Street Club, and other locales in Greenwich Village led me to the blog mentioned above.

I am reading and refreshing on all this historical material because next Monday I will be presenting a demonstration and talk before the Lake Granbury Art Association. Friday and Saturday I will engage in full-day workshops with the same group. And today I was notified that the enrollment for my April 1 workshop with the Art Study Club in Paris has maxed out. They are also an amazing energetic group of creative enthusiasts that I cannot wait to see again.

My heart is still full from time spent with the Palette of Roses Art League in Tyler, Texas a couple of weeks ago. Conversations shared with others about my New Byzantium dream help keep it alive and give me added adrenalin to what I experience in the creative quiet of my own studio here at home. I am also inspired by the work of students attending my Wednesday watercolor classes at Studio 48. If you are in the area and would like to attend, here is the link to those classes: https://www.gracielanecollection.com/art-workshops-arlington-tx

It is time to get back to preparations for Monday’s demo. Thanks for reading.