I have been away from the blog for weeks, it seems. We just completed a lovely family Christmas back home in St Louis. Renting an Airbnb with ample space, we enjoyed extended family time for 4 days.
Rented home on Tennessee AvenueSandi enjoying the doggies
Back home again, I am relishing this quiet night in the studio, before departing in the morning for our Gallery at Redlands to stay until the new year.
Back in Studio Eidolons
We must reserve a little back-shop, all our own, entirely free, wherein to establish our true liberty and principal retreat and solitude.
Montaigne
As I lean forward in anticipation of the new year, I intend to share more with my readers. My ideas, my journal scribblings, and my art will be more “out front” in the days ahead. I make no excuses; a demanding business schedule managed to squeeze out my blogging endeavors. My intention now is to come back to one of the things I have enjoyed most come and have missed greatly in the past months.
I will have more to share as the New Year draws near.
Farthe best part, I repeat, of every mind is not that which he knows, but that which hovers in gleams, suggestions, tantalizingunpossessed before him. His firm recorded knowledge soon loses all interest for him. But this dancing chorus of thoughts and hopes is the quarry of his future, is his possibility, and teaches him that his man’s life is of a ridiculous brevity and meanness, but that it is his first age and trial only of his young wings, and that vast revolutions, migrations, and gyres on gyres in the celestial societies invite him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his Journal
My tribute to David Crosby
“Railroad Blues”
Sacred Heart Church
. . . still working on this one!
This is not easy to write. Back in April, I posted on social media about the condition of my 94-year-old father who had just endured surgery. He is in St. Louis, my home town, and I reside in Arlington, Texas. I managed a pair of visits spanning a total of twenty days in April and May. What I haven’t shared until now is the news that my father is now in hospice care. We were finally told June 17 that the doctors would not be able to save him and there was only the task of keeping him comfortable as he rests in a care facility. Almost daily I mail him one of my watercolor greeting cards with a letter inside and several pictures of special memories. On some days I mail two or three cards. Sometimes he is able to read them. Sometimes not. Several times in recent weeks, I have received the call that it appears he won’t finish the day. Yesterday I got another one. All we can do is wait.
Painting is one of the few things I am able to do that keeps me focused. I have also been teaching numerous watercolor classes and have workshops coming up as well. Yesterday, I began completing large paintings that have been in progress for months, and decided to put them on this post.
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
On January 18, David Crosby died. I was seated in The Gallery at Redlands, our home gallery, when I received the news. Opening my sketchbook, I drew this portrait of him.
It was a sad day. But I had no idea in January that 2023 would bring me the current news of my dad, the reality of my now being sixty-nine years of age, and pondering mortality much more than previous years. All this to say that these new realities have not curtailed my creative eros, only intensified it in ways I still try to put in words.
David Crosby is the one musician who remained my muse since 1969, my freshman year in high school. During that year I heard the Crosby, Stills, Nash album and everything changed, musically, for me. I had been playing electric guitar, but immediately switched to acoustic, where I remained until this present day, and continually sought out other musicians who could sing and harmonize with me. In the following decades, I drew his portrait repeatedly, sang his songs, cried when he went to prison, cried again when he passed away. At least I got to watch him perform with his super group, four times. On January 18, I decided I was going to insert CSN&Y into one of my Palestine settings (the relic of the Pearlstone Grocery is a couple of blocks away from our gallery).
The Pearlstone Grocery died many years ago and now continues to decay under the Texas sun. The owner apparently has stuffed the building with his trash, maybe hoping some day a fire will finish off the structure? I never understood why anyone with enough money to purchase an historic building would choose to let it rot away for everyone to view. At any rate, the site of the building with its rich history, tucked into the beautiful landscape of Palestine juxtaposes life and death before my eyes in a way that I try to turn into Art.
“Railroad Blues”
This watercolor is the second in my “Palestine Blues” series. The initial painting I’ve posted before, with the ghost of Lightnin’ Hopkins walking along the rails. In this painting, I’ve added a harp player I met December 8, 2019. He is Don Gallia. The event was the Randy Brodnax Christmas Show, a three-day art festival held inside the Sons of Hermann Hall in the Deep Ellum section of Dallas. On Sunday morning, during Church in the Bar, I was delighted to hear Don blowing harp alongside a pair of guitar players. I took several photos of him as he played, and used one of them as a model so I could insert him into this composition alongside Lightnin’. I’ve added a story for my greeting card of this painting:
Autumn was in the air. Trees were still verdant green, but cool winds flipped the leaves over, showing the creamy undersides, lending sparkle to the crowns. Leaning against a burn barrel outside the relic of the Pearlstone Grocery, a bluesman was blowing harp. The melancholy notes drifted in the wind.
“Watcha playin’ there?” The harp player spun around, startled to see a black man in a broad-brimmed hat, toting a guitar case.
“Jus’ blowin’ I guess.”
“Soun’ like blues t’ me,” the guitar man smiled. “Mine if I join ya?”
“Sure, why not?” The man patted the harmonica on his knee and watched the stranger as he laid the guitar case down on the burnt grass, released the latches, and lifted out his battered guitar. Sitting down on the grass, he reached for the tuning keys and began re-tuning his box to open-G. Then he took out a piece of copper pipe, slipped it on his pinkie, and began making his guitar groan and moan with each slide up and down the neck.
Impressed, the harp player asked, “So how are we gonna do this?”
Looking up, the guitar man smiled and said, “You jus’ play that thang all up and down the walls, an’ I’ll meet cha on the corner.”
Sacred Heart Church
This magnificent Catholic church towers across the street from The Gallery at Redlands. I have painted it countless times, but still strive to get it right. On one particular day, when the sun set behind the church, the rays blazed through the stained glass windows, and I took several photos. This is my first attempt to capture the glory of the stained glass. I thought the composition would be bland if I left the sky nearly white as it was that day when the sun set and blasted through the church interior. Darkening the sky gave the overall composition more pop, but seldom does stained glass glow this brightly from a church’s interior lighting. I’m still puzzling this out for future painting attempts.
still working on this one . . .
These are the remains of the studio belonging to the late Ancel E. Nunn, famous painter and illustrator from Palestine’s glory days. He loved the Bright & Early logo and painted it on the interior wall of his studio for his own inspiration. Alas, his studio now consists of three walls and no roof.
The mural deteriorated and disappeared long ago. My Palestine friend Ben Campbell took many photos of the mural from the days it still existed and let me use his collection to recreate what no longer is visible.
Whence things have their origin, there they must also pass away according to necessity . . . according to the ordinance of time.
Anaximander, 6th century BCE
I wasn’t able to read Greek texts until the early 1980’s. But by the time I did, I had already fixated on my subjects for art–scenes and objects depicting the eroding images of time. When I established my sole proprietorship, I chose Recollections 54, the year of my birth accompanied by scenes of American nostalgia from my childhood. Though now a senior citizen, I still breathe the Wordsworthian recollections of days that have disappeared from our landscape, but not our memories. I am a painter of memories. I still hold them close to my breast like the loving warmth I feel from my small dog in the studio.
As I was working through this blog, pausing at intervals to breathe and begin again, my friend Dian Darr sent this anniversary photo from five years ago. The timing could not be more poignant. July and August were the months Sandi and I enjoyed with Dian and Ron at Riverbend Resort in South Fork, Colorado. The cold breezes from the San Juan mountains were the perfect antithesis to this infernal Texas summer climate. Among my fondest memories were fly-fishing the stream, and sitting on the cabin deck to do watercolor sketches with Jack the camp cat lounging beneath the table.
Reading Emerson’s Journal this morning stirred me deeply and convinced me to try and put out this blog of feelings and emotions I now hold close.
This one’s for you, Dad. Thank you for all you’ve done to enrich us. Thank you especially for passing on to me an eye that seeks to remember.
What I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.
Edward Hopper
It wasn’t a good day. After a couple of days of progress in the hospital that led physicians to speak of Dad’s transfer to rehab, he suddenly took a turn for the worse. Today was the second bad day, and my sister and I fought off despair. Dad seemed to stabilize this afternoon, so we left, and I took a long walk through the High Ridge neighborhoods. Suddenly, looking up near sundown as I passed through an apartment complex, I saw something that immediately reminded me of one of Edward Hopper’s iconic paintings. I took the photo with my phone, and now I sit at my sister’s dining room table tonight and begin to paint after a hiatus that has gone on I don’t know how long.
Second Story Sunlight
The act of painting has rescued me tonight. I’ll rise early in the morning and visit Dad, hoping for some kind of progress.
Weare called upon to do something new, to confront a no man’s land, to push into a forest where there are no well-worn paths and from which no one has returned to guide us. This is what the existentialists call the anxiety of nothingness. To live into the future means to leap into the unknown, and this requires a degree of courage for which there is no immediate precedent and which few people realize
Rollo May, The Courage to Create
I received the call last Thursday. Dad was being rushed by ambulance to downtown St. Louis for emergency vascular surgery. He is 94 years old. I crumpled. Then I packed a suitcase and items I felt I would need, and began my drive to St. Louis. At age 69, I don’t possess the energy for these long road trips that I used to know. Leaving Arlington, Texas after 3 p.m., I found myself sleepy in Strafford, Missouri by 11, and pulled over at a truck stop parking lot to sleep behind the wheel for three hours. Then on to St. Louis, arriving around 6 and looking for a 24-hour restaurant for breakfast. My sister phoned around 8 and I felt comfortable going to her house where they graciously provided me a guest room. Showered and dressed, I arrived at the hospital in the late morning to find my dad in the ICU, looking small, crumpled and helpless. Now it is Monday, late. Dad is in a private room, still speaking incoherently (this is expected from the anesthetic effects on the elderly). But today he fed himself, requiring no assistance, so I found something on which to plant hope.
Tonight, sitting up in bed reading, waiting for sleep, I came across the Rollo May observation posted above. I found it timely. I know all too well the existentialist anxieties spawned by uncertain futures. The past few days have beaten me down, with twice a day travels downtown to the hospital and twice a day visits to my childhood home to check on and comfort my mom the best I can. By the time I get back to my sister’s house at night I am wrung out like a moldy sponge, and I’ve had difficulty beating back despair. My home is far away, my family, my gallery, my circle of friends. And I needed someone like Rollo May to encourage me to push forward into the abyss and do what I know how to do.
Tonight I went ahead and laid out my plans for the four watercolor classes I’ve scheduled for the rest of this month. If any of you, my readers, wish to participate in any of these classes, please notify me through this blog, or my phone (817) 821-8702, or email dmtripp2000@yahoo.com.
My calendar is as follows:
Wednesday, May 10, 1-4:00–painting the bison in the snow at Studio 48, 4720 S. Cooper, Arlington, Texas, in the Gracie Lane Boutique building.
Saturday, May 13, 1-4:00–painting the bomber fishing lure at Gallery at Redlands, 400 N. Queen St., Palestine, Texas.
Saturday, May 20, 1-4:00–painting the Oxbow Bakery, Gallery at Redlands
Saturday, May 27, 1-4:00–painting the bison in the snow, Gallery at Redlands.
Vintage Bomber lure lurking in the depths
Palestine’s historic Oxbow Bakery
Bison in the snow
Making art is the only way I know how to push into the uncertain future and assert myself in the face of the abyss. In a way beyond describing, I have found peace tonight, and invite kindred spirits to join me in these creative activities that lie ahead.
I’m looking forward to seeing Dad again in the morning, and hoping to see more progress. My thanks to all of you for the notes of encouragement you have sent my way.
Isaiah Glen Shields, Passing Through Palestine–our Contemporary John Muir
“Hey, I saw you on TV the other day. You’re the fella that’s walkin’ across the country!”
Hearing these words in the lobby of The Redlands Hotel Saturday stopped me in my tracks. The 28-year-old trim young man wearing serious hiking shoes merely smiled at what he no doubt has heard hundreds of times over the past year. I couldn’t resist a sit-down with Isaiah Glen Shields in The Gallery at Redlands, because I ached to hear his story. I recalled the writings of John Muir I read back in 1987:
I set forth [from Indianapolis] on a thousand-mile walk to the Gulf of Mexico.”
Chatting in the Gallery
Isaiah walked out of his house in Provo, Utah on May 13, 2021 and set out for Cape Alava, Washington, the westernmost geographical spot in our nation. His ultimate destination: the easternmost spot in our country, the West Quoddy Head Lighthouse in Lubec, Maine. Having walked the entire distance to Palestine, Texas, he set out for Houston late in the afternoon, planning ultimately to walk to Louisiana, then on to Florida, and ultimately turn northward toward Maine.
I had to ask him when he hatched this vision, assuming that it was a gradual idea rather than an instantaneous flash of inspiration. His story was engaging: graduating from Brigham Young University with a degree in “strategy” (he said), he found himself working uninspired jobs in corporate finance, often staying no longer than two months at a single position. In July 2020, it dawned on him that every morning on the job when logging on to his computer, he was met with a luminous, colorful photo of some scenic place on our globe. On that particular day he asked himself, “Why on earth am I spending the best years of my life sitting indoors staring at a computer screen rather than being out there in the midst of all this wonder and natural beauty?” From that day he laid the groundwork for the time when he would walk out the door of his home and tramp across the country, taking in the natural wonders and meeting people in the small towns.
Taking advantage of the best technology, Isaiah tells the daily story of his travels on Facebook (Isaiah Glen Shields), Instagram (igshields27), Youtube (you do you), and can be reached on Venmo (@isaiah-shields). Since yesterday, I have had the sincere pleasure of following his travels and vicariously enjoying his connections with people he meets along the way.
Chatting it up with Dave Shultz at the Pint and Barrel Draughthouse
Isaiah’s day in Palestine marked Day #250 in his trek, and we hope he found some enrichment in talking with the people here as we certainly drew much inspiration from him.
Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoy following Isaiah’s odyssey.
Looking Forward to Occupying Studio Eidolons Later Today
Reason indeed demands unity, but Nature demands multiplicity, and both systems of legislation lay claim to man’s obedience.
Friedrich Schiller,, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Fourth Letter
I recall how flummoxed we all felt sitting in a doctoral seminar years ago when Professor W. D. Davies held up a monograph that all of us had read and deeply admired for its scholarly erudition. The professor said: “The conclusions are so clear and simple that I cannot bring myself to accept them. Nothing is simple.” A few years later, while taking a walk, another dear friend and mentor, Dr. L. Robert Stevens mused: “In a world so complex, I am convinced that it is far easier to be wrong than right.”
Now, reading Schiller’s maxim above, the words of these reflective men re-visit me forty years later. Something in our nature compels us to make sense of our complicated surroundings, and then our simplifications become canonical to us. The reason I am pondering this matter is because I have started out this New Year convinced that if I am to continue to grow in my watercolor pursuits, then I must adopt the perspective of the curious, inquisitive student in the laboratory rather than the seasoned teacher in the classroom. Being now retired, I am happy not to be called upon daily to set forth propositions that I thought were churned out by boards and committees to satisfy testing standards. I found little satisfaction over the years knowing that if I simply put numbers in the spreadsheets for grades by deadline, that I had done my job satisfactorily. Believing that educational quality could not be quantified, I remained bothered that students’ successes would depend on the damned numbers more than thoughtful letters of recommendation.
What is on my mind this morning is this: I will soon be teaching on Watercolor Wednesdays again in Arlington, Texas. And my method will be to line up steps for students to follow as they attempt to paint selected compositions in a three-hour period. I have never had a problem with that. My problem is the suspicion that I am following my own steps, convinced that the pattern is adequate for its particular subject. I don’t want to do that any longer. The next painting I pursue, once I am back in my own studio (today is a travel day–at least six hours on the road before home is reached once again), I intend to tackle a familiar subject but to try and paint it as if it were my first attempt. When I taught phenomenology, I told my students that epoché was the suspension of judgment, one’s willingness to put preconceived notions back on the shelf in order to approach a subject with more openness.
Schiller argued that nature represented multiplicity while our reasoning faculties demanded simplicity. As a teacher, I always understood the necessity of breaking complicated issues down to simpler steps for students to absorb. But I also tried to urge them that the issues were always more complex than the way we presented them. So also in making art–we approach the complexity with simpler steps, but must always admit that more is required if Quality is to be approached. So . . . in the future when I teach, I’ll try to urge my participants to stretch beyond the steps I present, to dare to explore, to stretch, to expand the possibilities.
The story is told that Socrates, when questioned whether or not he was the wisest in the land, answered this way (I paraphrase): I did not consider myself the wisest, so I went about seeking counsel from others considered wiser. When I asked about issues I did not understand, I listened to their answers and soon concluded that they didn’t know either. However, they were convinced that they did in fact know. So, I suppose that alone makes me the wisest in the land; I know that I don’t know, whereas they continue not to know that they don’t know. To know that you don’t know is the beginning of knowledge.
Beginning this New Year, I acknowledge that I know less about making art than I thought I knew in the past. With that mindset, I am ready to explore and learn. I’m excited to find out what can be discovered in the days ahead, and grateful I still have the ability to pursue this passion.
Thanks for reading, and please follow your bliss in this New Year stretched out before you.
1903 house in Flippin, Arkansas. 18 x 24″ framed $400
Yet for better or for worse we love things that bear the marks of grime, soot, and weather, and we love the colors and the sheen that call to mind the past that made them.
Jun’ichero Tanizaki
Sunday mornings usually draw me back to the Bible to read for creative as well as living inspiration. Again this morning, I read the creation narratives in Genesis, pondering about the world as a chaotic void until God organized it through a series of spoken words. As an artist, I am more amazed at my current age than ever before at the profound dynamics that go into any kind of creative activity.
My continued reading of Emile Zola’s The Masterpiece feeds my daily creative eros. Recently, I have returned to drawing and watercolor sketching in a diary to break out of the routine of working on commission pieces (I have two more to complete before all orders are finally filled). What I read this morning certainly set off a string of musings. The words come from an older, seasoned artist in his studio:
“It may suprise you,” he said, for he had been successful from an early age and his place in French painting was now firmly established, “but there are days when I question my ability to draw a simple thing like a nose. . . . Every picture I paint, I’m as excited as the rawest novice; my heart thumps like mad, my mouth goes dry out of sheer emotion. “
Some years back, when my watercolors began selling more successfully and I took blogging and marketing more seriously, I developed this fear of “whipping out Tripps to feed the market.” Not only did I worry about being locked into a particular style to keep up with demand; I still wondered exactly what my “style” was. I have posted a painting above from my earlier years when I focused on aged, decaying subjects. I still work on those kinds of images, but not exclusively. Rather, I have tried to broaden my subject matter to pick up some themes I’ve always wished to pursue but never took the time to do so (Hence, my recent trout fly patterns).
I believe all of us hope to live out our lives free of regrets. However, recently, I do look back on my college years with regret–I was an art major, but relied on my talent and listened very little to what my instructors tried to teach me. I had excellent instructors, and wish to this day I had been more mature and open to what they had to offer. Now at my present age, I am attempting to learn things I should have learned long ago as I experiment daily in the studio, and truly try to be “open” to experimenting. As the days proceed, I will most likely post the drawings and watercolor sketches I’m attempting, along with the commissioned work in progress.
Can anybody tell me where the road is? I’m just trying to find my way back home.
Guy Davis, Blues musician
“Tell Me Where the Road Is” watercolor 26.5h x 24w” frame size. $500
17h x 14w” unframed signed & numbered edition, $70
The holiday season has finally arrived and my blood stirs with every thought. Descending the stairs this morning into the lobby of the Redlands Hotel, decked out in Christmas attire, I felt like a small boy again, holding hands with Mom and Dad while walking St. Louis sidewalks on frigid nights and looking in department store windows. The thought made my heart quiver, and I am thankful for many, many realities including my parents both still being alive. Thanksgiving cannot arrive soon enough, sitting around a table with those I love, talking and laughing in gratitude for all the good that has come in our many years together.
Lobby of The Redlands Hotel, Palestine, Texas
Ten more suites are booked for tonight. The Polar Express brings 65,000 people to Palestine these final weeks of the year. Already the lobby is stirring with the exclamations of first-time guests, unprepared for what their eyes see. Last night it was my pleasure to escort a couple to their room on the fourth floor and I’ll never forget the expressions on their faces when they saw their lovely suite all decorated for Christmas. What a wonderful season.
The Gallery at Redlands
I will never stop being grateful for being provided such a lovely space to make and display my art. I worked on the Union Pacific Big Boy watercolor at the drafting table till late last night, and am confident I’ll finish it later today.
Union Pacific Big Boy #4014
The holiday travels just around the corner drove me to return to my reading of Homer’s Odyssey. Because of my work on the series I’ve titled “Turvey’s Corner 63050”, I have experienced many hours in recent weeks re-visiting memories and visions from childhood. Working on the watercolors and stories of that subject fill me with a depth of feeling I cannot describe adequately. While translating the Odyssey (I will never cease giving thanks to the seminary for teaching me Greek) and lingering over those ancient words, I feel such a profound connection to Odysseus navigating over that vast sea. Seafaring tales have always tugged at my heart, though I have been landbound in these United States throughout my life. My ship has always been a vehicle, and in recent years my aged Jeep has taken me over the broad seas of the rolling American landscape, my compass following a paved highway whining beneath my tires. The various islands and adventures of Odysseus have been the small towns and communities where I have moored for a temporary stay while finding my way back home.
I didn’t know until translating Homer that our word “nostalgia” comes from a Greek compound, nostos meaning return and algos meaning pain, metaphorically a pain of mind. Noun and verb forms of “return” occur 245 times in Homer’s writings, and “pain” occurs seventy-nine. Odysseus endured constant pain as he navigated the return to his roots. I know the comingled pain and comfort I feel as I recall scenes from my past and seek a return for better understanding. I consider this to be one of the finest gifts of being human and visited by memory.
I am aware that not everybody sees value in revisiting the past. In fact, Homer’s Odyssey, to many if not most, is an overrated piece of literature. Robert Fagles wrote that “one ancient critic, the author of the treatise On the Sublime, thought that the Odyssey was the product of Homer’s old age, of “a mind in decline; it was a work that could be compared to the setting sun–the size remained, without the force.” I cannot agree to this. Throughout my life, memory has been my most sacred possession, though it is probably more accurate to say it has possessed me. Either way, I am thankful to have life still in me to devote this quest to find my way back home.
The sight of Our Lady Queen of Peace Church tightened the heart of the young divinity student when he turned the corner onto Queen Street. The early Sunday morning stroll had been the first relaxing moment he felt since his return to Turvey’s Corner for a semester break visit. The looming façade brought into his memory a passage he had recently translated from his Greek New Testament:
For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them. (Ephesians 2:10)
During his teenage years, the fellow had “surrendered to the ministry” (the congregation’s description of his decision). Under the close watch of the Divinity School, he pursued with delight the serious exposition of the scriptures, and when he came across this passage, he felt his entire life turning smoothly as if on a hinge. The first eighteen years of his life had been given to pursuit of the arts, because it was discovered that he had a talent for drawing as soon as he was old enough to hold a pencil. But at age eighteen, he departed from the arts and pursued theology, believing that he should live a life of service to others rather than the pursuit of beauty.
When he translated the Ephesians passage, he discovered that the word rendered “workmanship” was poiēma, from which we take our word “poem.” We are God’s poem, he mused. Pursuing the Greek construction, he discovered to his amazement that “poem” is better translated “work of art.” We are God’s work of art. The text urges that we are God’s work of art, and we have been created for the purpose of quality work, and God determined beforehand that we should pursue that work.
The goals of pastoral ministry evaporated like the fresh dew on a summer morning as the young man suddenly determined that his natural, inborn talent lay in making art. During this Sunday morning walk, his mind was flooded with ideas and questions revolving around how he could merge his inborn artistic gift with the recent years of theological scholarship.
Mass would be starting in about ten minutes. He decided he would continue to pursue his own worship as he sauntered around the sleepy town. A rich Sunday morning was dawning.
. . . . .
I have begun work on the next installment of my Turvey’s Corner 63050 series. The actual setting above is a view of The Redlands Hotel (The Gallery at Redlands is on the first floor just inside the entrance shown). Across the street is the historic Sacred Heart Catholic Church that I have already painted four times. I have decided to include this city block in my fictional Turvey’s Corner series, and with it I am introducing a new character. The above story is a first draft that I hope to polish considerably over time.
Thunderstorms are pounding east Texas as I write this, and the Palestine skies are extremely dark and heavy. I stepped out once to run an errand and regretted it as I got soaked to the skin. This is a perfect day for staying inside to paint and read.
I am also very proud to announce that a dear friend and artist/colleague I have known for over twenty years, Cindy Thomas, has decided to make a video documentary of my work. The Turvey’s Corner 63050 series will be included in the presentation, and we will be filming from my home studio, our Gallery at Redlands, and the remote country store location in east Texas where I escape from time to time to work on my art. This will be a long-term project, and we shall keep you posted as it progresses.
One Happy Cluster of Athletes!
For days I have debated over whether or not to include this in my blog. I try to present myself as artist, thinker, writer, etc., but I feel compelled now to reveal that I am a St. Louis native, and that the St. Louis Blues became a franchise fifty-two years ago, when I was a high school freshman. I watched them enter the Stanley Cup Finals their first three seasons in existence and not win a single game–swept all three times, Then, for forty-nine more seasons they seemed to be a team built for the playoffs but not a championship. They made the playoffs twenty-five consecutive seasons, only to be eliminated in the first or second round. But every year I continued to watch, and believe.
On January 3 this year, midway through the season, the Blues were dead last in the NHL–anchored solidly in thirty-first place. Their coach had been fired and an assistant coach promoted as interim head coach. After January 3, they began to win. They made the playoffs as the third seed in their division. And then they began the four rounds of playoffs, each one a best-of-seven series. Sixteen wins were required to bring a Stanley Cup to their city for the first time in their fifty-two year history.
What I watched this time was the most amazing playoff series in my entire life. From my perspective, the Blues were less skilled than all four opponents they faced–Winnepeg, Dallas, San Jose and Boston. In every matchup, the Blues were slower and possessed fewer quality goal scorers. Some of their losses were the most humiliating lop-sided blow-outs on the scoreboard. Yet they proved resilient, almost never losing two consecutive games. After every loss, they regrouped and returned, eliminating Winnipeg in six games, Dallas in seven, San Jose in six, and ultimately Boston in seven. In every best-of-seven series, the Blues played hard-nosed, blue-collar style hockey, their MVP and leading scorer revealing after it was all over that he was playing with fractured ribs from the very first series.
I have enjoyed every St. Louis Cardinals World Series championship. And I felt something special when the St. Louis Rams won the Super Bowl (but that team, especially its owner, can rot in hell now, as far as I am concerned). What I am feeling this morning with this St. Louis Blues championship I will never be able to describe. Fifty-two years the city languished as the team pushed for that accomplishment. And now they raise the Cup. And though several days have passed since that historic night, I am still vibrating from the memories.
Thanks for reading.
I make art in order to discover.
I journal when I feel alone.
I blog to remind myself I am not alone.
. . . and the Blues are the Stanley Cup Champions!!!!!
Leaning into the polar winds that snapped through the narrow valley of the sleeping Missouri town, Denzil Tucker emerged from the Terra Lounge bar with his snow shovel. Frigid overnight winds had hardened the drifts across the walkway. As he bent to his task, the piercing cacophonous whistle from the Frisco Railroad F9 diesel signaled its approach to the crossing, half a block from the tavern, and Denzil felt beneath his boots the vibrations of the thundering freight cars as they rolled by.
Turning his head, he looked back up the empty street to regather his thoughts. It was a sixteen-degree December morning in Turvey’s Corner, and his mind was numb to the possibilities of anything memorable happening on this particular day. The Korean Conflict was two years behind him, the 38th parallel over 7,000 miles away. But his first-born son, not yet a year old, was slumbering in a dark bedroom on the second story above, and these thoughts offered him a measure of serenity in the face of the frozen morning.
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My blog has been silent for several weeks, not due to writer’s or painter’s block, but because of days spent in the studio painting and at the desk researching and writing. Since the early 1990’s, I have had this compulsion to paint a series of watercolors illustrating the quintessential American town. My inspiration has been the literary contributions of Garrison Keillor, Thornton Wilder, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Edgar Lee Masters, William Faulkner and others. In addition to the paintings, I have sought to develop a cast of characters with their own stories, hoping to come up with my own work combining painting and literature. This project has now spanned nearly three decades, with countless paintings done and just as many stories written. Now that I have begun chipping away at my memoir, I have decided to pull together these fragments from years gone by, and contribute new paintings and stories to the growing collection. Back in March, I held my first gallery talk on “Art in Small Town America” and announced to that audience my intentions for this project.
My town is named Turvey’s Corner, and the zip code falls between two Missouri towns that shaped my upbringing–High Ridge 63049 and House Springs 63051. The painting above is taken from a forgotten corner of lower House Springs, where Highway MM intersects with a recently altered old Highway 30. Over the years I have photographed this row of buildings in all seasons of the year and decided this time to focus on one of my winter compositions.
The narrative for this collection of paintings is loosely constructed from my personal life experience, the man shoveling snow above is my father (with a fake name). The Korean conflict is true, and I am the infant sleeping upstairs. The year is 1954. My father was never a tavern owner, but I thought that story would yield more character than his work as a mechanic for St. Louis car dealerships. I’m still fleshing out the details, and deeply enjoying the work as it unfolds.
Recollections 54 The Art of David Tripp 