Touched by Louise Nevelson

Watercolor Commission in Progress

In her seventies, Nevelson’s energies were unceasing . . . . she described her creative life to an interviewer. . . “An artist goes to the studio to work. Not when the spirit moves you; you go every day and work–just plain work, physical work–and you keep right on going. The tools are put away at night, and the studio is swept down, and things you want for tomorrow morning are placed out.” And when you return the next day, she added, “Everything is clean, is nice. You are very happy. You start working.”

Richard Lacayo, Last Light: How Six Great Artists Made Old age a Time of Triumph

I’m tired tonight, as I’ve been every night this past week. But I’ve always gone to bed exhilarated by the progress made on this commission. Plein Air on the White River will end tomorrow afternoon after I finish judging the competition that began Wednesday morning. A host of enthusiastic artists have been out painting daily and will turn in all their work tomorrow morning. I’m looking forward to feasting my eyes on all their inspired pieces.

I am hoping to get my body into shape so I can feel the energy Louise Nevelson felt in her seventies. Thanks to some changes in my lifestyle of late, I have started to feel a significant change this week. The nine-hour drive on Monday left me feeling somewhat drained on Tuesday, but the enthusiasm of the plein air artists made the all-day workshop a very engaging and affirming activity. By Wednesday, I was ready to handle any tasks required of me and found time to work on my watercolor commission when the other tasks were completed. The schedule this week was balanced such that I found quality hours daily to take up what I chose, and I’m pleased that I had the interest and energy to work on this assignment. The commission is due on the 22nd, I leave for St. Louis tomorrow, but I’m confident now that when the time comes for me to return to Texas, this piece will be ready for delivery.

I’m grateful to the White River artists for making this event so inspiring. Time spent with these artists has put a spring back into my step.

Thanks for reading.

Working Into the Night With a Glad Heart

Not just the labor of months, that show was the work of a lifetime.

Remark about Louise Nevelson’s solo show at age 60, by Richard Lacayo, Last Light: How Six Great Artists Made Old Age a Time of Triumph

This is my fourth day at Plein Air on the White River in Gaston’s Resort in Lakeview, Arkansas. And the first time I’ve been able to stop and post a blog. The experience has been rich indeed, and I’ll post pictures at the end of this entry. The shot above was from last night, late in the cabin, when I had time alone to resume work on a commission started last week at home. This morning I’ve moved to the bedroom to work at the window seat:

I’ll do my second art demo this afternoon at 4:00. I did my first one Tuesday during the all-day plein air workshop.

I’ve taken delight reading about the life of sculptor Louise Nevelson, finally getting recognition at age 60. And I love the insights of this entire book, about famous American artists in their senior years, still chipping away at their craft, as I do mine. When asked how long it took me to complete a current painting, my general answer is 70 years. I know that I can kick out an 8 x 10″ plein air watercolor in 60-90 minutes. But I really take seriously all that goes into making a single piece. Each of my paintings or drawings is my response to the world I encounter. I pour all my inner resources–my imagination, my education, my curiosity, my attention to detail, my critical faculty–all of this filters what I see as I translate it onto a white rectangle lying before me, waiting.

One of the many perfections of this week has been the space and quiet embracing me every day and night. I haven’t known such quiet and a “slowing down” of the world since my week on the Laguna Madre in 2015 when I worked as Artist in Residence for Texas A&M University at Corpus Christi. This morning, I feel that quiet all over again that I knew and loved in those days of painting. I also knew that yesterday all afternoon and evening till I retired to bed. No sense of time or deadlines or schedules. Just time to paint, to read, to reflect, to journal–all quality time.

I’ve made so many new and wonderful artist friends at this retreat as well. And I cannot express the depth of feeling I experience when I see so many people happily engaged in making art in the open air. I will gladly post many pictures I took of the Tuesday workshop event when they finally arrive on my email. The Wi-Fi here is slow as molasses, and I have yet to receive the photos I’ve transferred for blogging . . .

Thanks for reading.

Working Late on a Commission

“A pessimist? I guess so. I’m not proud of it. At my age don’t you get to be? When I see all those students running around painting–studying like mad–I say, ‘What’s the use? It all ends the same place.’ At fifty you don’t think of the end much, but at eighty you think about it a lot. Find me a philosopher to comfort me in my old age.”

Edward Hopper (interview with Brian O’Doherty published in American Masters: The Voice and the Myth)

Saturday night finds me at my drafting table in Studio Eidolons, where I have spent the entire day, and could well remain the entire tomorrow. I’m working to complete a watercolor commission of a private residence before leaving early Monday for a thrilling week judging, workshopping and demonstrating at the Plein Air on the White River event at Gaston’s White River Resort in Lakeview, Arkansas. All of the above reads as a romance, but in reality, I’m feeling like a grinder, and have felt this all week. But I’m proud of what I do, and grateful for these opportunities.

During drying times in the watercolor process, I have been reading up on Edward Hopper, one of my guiding spirits in painting. I posted his quote from the closing years of his life, and recall the first time I read it when I was in my fifties. I have come to agree with him. And as for seeking counsel and comfort from a philosopher on the aging thing, I have in recent years enjoyed more and more the intimate connection I feel with the likes of artists Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth, Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko. What those aged men shared with interviewers has been left as a veritable gift for myself and others who seek something positive about living out our senior years. I lack one chapter finishing Last Light: How Six Great Artists Made Old Age a Time of Triumph. This book too, is proving a remarkable treasure.

Hopper poked fun at the young artists scurrying about “studying like mad.” I still do that, and love the lifestyle of research. I completed graduate school in 1987, but still feel the urge to research, think and write about the creative process. I’m still hungry. And though I’ve recently turned seventy, I’m picking up some of the “bad” habits from those earlier years in libraries, classrooms and studios–I just brewed a pot of “cowboy coffee” and am drinking it tonight with delight (honestly this is something I rarely do at this age, at this hour).

I frequently come up with one-word descriptions of how I regard myself as artist of the moment, sometimes Explorer, sometimes Scholar, sometimes Grinder. This weekend, it is certainly Grinder. But I like it. Decades ago, I hoped to gain fame as an artist. I don’t know when I stopped hoping for that. All I can say in these senior years is this: I’m grateful to have lived this long and experienced all that comes with living a creative life. When I had my last birthday, I thought “if I could just have ten more years.” I’ll try to stop thinking that thought. I’m just glad to have what I now have, and hope other creatives can feel the same measure of gratitude and joy. There is no life like it, as far as I’m concerned.

I’ll say Good-night now, and 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.

Staying up Much Too Late

Work on a new commission

. . . whereas [Norman] Rockwell was an indefatigable workhorse, [Edward] Hopper was slow, methodical, given to self-doubt, and long periods of reluctance to try a new canvas.

Gordon Theisen, Staying Up Much Too Late: Edward Hopper’s NIGHTHAWKS and the Dark Side of the American Psyche

This is so unlike me, being up at 2 a.m., working on a commission. But it is due by the end of the week, and I’ll travel to Palestine later today to put our Gallery at Redlands back together (after taking much of the furniture out of it for last weekend’s art festival). Saturday will find me back home while Sandi manages the Gallery at Redlands and sponsors our gallery artist Kathy Lamb during the monthly Art Walk.

My sentiments at this hour are reminiscent of years spent in graduate school, and later teaching. Those earlier days frequently found me up all hours of the night working on a lecture or assembling work for an art show or festival or gallery event. I rarely do that now. Tonight is just a matter of sticking with a deadline.

I posted the contrast of artists Norman Rockwell and Edward Hopper above because I have been in both pairs of shoes throughout my life. And right now, I am somehow wearing both pairs of shoes: I am working tirelessly into the night, yet frequently laying down the brush or pencil to cross the studio, read, reflect, journal, blog, and look up from time to time to stare across the room at the emerging painting, hoping to sharpen perspective and decide how to proceed from here. I have reached a conclusion that I do better work when I take frequent breaks to let the painting breathe, and allow myself to take up something else for awhile in order to put fresh eyes back onto the painting and resume the task. Though the hour now is late, I feel that it is one charged with quality.

I wanted to share one of my recent watercolors just framed today. This was the only one I did not take to the Dallas festival last weekend. As it turned out, I sold the other four snow scenes. This is the only one remaining in my portfolio, and I really want to take it to Colorado for the Trinidad Art Fest in July. Hopefully, I will create a few more snow scenes to replace the ones that have recently been purchased.

Time to resume the commission. Thanks for reading.

I create art in order to discover.

I journal when I feel alone.

I blog to remind myself I am not alone.

A Quick Word Before Returning to Work . . .

To mean something, anything, art must provide a specific sense of where you are and where you have been, of your particular take on the larger history of which you, willingly or not, form a part.

Gordon Theisen, Staying Up Much Too Late: Edward Hopper’s NIGHTHAWKS and the Dark Side of the American Psyche

I am under a crushing deadline to finish a commission this week. But I feel compelled to share something that resonated with me while reading and journaling early this morning over coffee. The above quote from a book I am now re-reading with delight brought to the surface something simmering within me for months.

I’m still very content with living the life of a creative during these retirement years. Last weekend, while sitting in the Artscape 2024 festival and looking into my booth at my display, it suddenly occurred to me that my watercolors are my autobiography. Everything I paint and display originates from a scene in my life worth remembering, to me. As I thought about current artists and their bodies of work, I realized that there are many who are fixed in one specific subject matter or genre. One may do only still lifes. Another portraiture. Another landscapes, etc. When looking at my own work, the only common denominator is watercolor. All the subjects come from pieces of my past. Frequently, I was asked if all the work was of Texas scenes. My answer: Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Oklahoma, Missouri and Arkansas–places I’ve visited that left a profound impression on me worth recording in paint.

I’m going to save Gordon Theisen’s quote and pull it out every time I second-guess what I am doing with my art.

Back to work. Thanks for reading.

Back to Work in the Art Festival Afterglow

My Booth in Dallas Artscape 2024

There is more dawn to come. The sun is but a morning star.

Henry David Thoreau

It is now Wednesday morning. I have had several days to recuperate from Artscape 2024 at the Dallas Arboretum. The festival was a spectacular financial success for me, despite severe thunderstorms that continually threatened. Load-In was moved up to Thursday, since Friday was expecting heavy rains throughout the day. With the help of Sandi and another dear friend, we put the tent together Thursday, then I remained on the scene till 8:30 that night, finishing out the interior. Returning Friday in the pouring rain, I managed to stay dry inside my closed tent, hanging all the original work and putting greeting cards, limited edition prints and matted originals in their respective bins and finally labeling everything. By the time 6:00 arrived, the rains had stopped and the VIP crowd showed up for the two-hour opening. Saturday and Sunday also were rain-free during festival hours, but a severe Saturday night storm damaged several booths and by the time the final day opened, there were only 53 artists remaining. Tearing down and loading out witnessed my return home around 9:30 p.m. Monday was spent unloading our two vehicles and putting everything back into storage. Yesterday I tidied my home Studio Eidolons, totally wrecked and ransacked by my preparations for the festival.

Today I break ground on a new watercolor commission with a weekend deadline. Friday I return to Gallery at Redlands for only a day, with Sandi staying into Saturday to host gallery artist Kathy Lamb for Palestine’s monthly Art Walk. I will be back at home, packing and loading for a Monday departure for Arkansas, where I am honored to judge the Plein Air on the White River event in addition to conducting a workshop and a pair of watercolor demos. Turning 70 on April 20, I definitely feel the aging as I write this and think of what lies ahead. Despite the physical sagging, I can honestly testify that my spirit is exhilarated and grateful for these experiences. I never wished to sit for weeks in a rocking chair, watching television once I retired seven years ago. A gallery was offered to me, and I still regard that as one of the greatest gifts in my life span.

I experience exhilaration, not only for next week’s Arkansas encounter (I have enjoyed these dear artist friends on three previous occasions), but two more art festivals that have popped up: Artscape at the Dallas Arboretum will offer an additional festival over Father’s Day weekend due to weather cancellations last week. And I have also been accepted into Colorado’s Trinidad Art Fest 2024 July 13-14. I have also been invited to conduct a two-day watercolor workshop in October at the Woman’s Club in Fort Worth. I also hope to be included in the Edom Art Festival in October. I have already applied, but am awaiting a response. In addition to all this, two more watercolor commissions have just been offered. So I suppose I’m staying quite busy for a 70-year-old retiree. But I don’t feel overworked, and do appreciate the long leisurely spaces between appointments. I’m certainly not living the grinding life I knew when employed forty-plus hours per week.

This morning I also enjoy the lingering afterglow of last weekend’s festival. On Friday and Saturday, my booth was never empty of patrons, and I’m still stunned at the volume of sales. I have never before sold so many framed original watercolors at any single event. It was fortunate that I brought along a large selection of extras, because I worked hard at filling all the gaps in the display. As welcome as the sales were, I still cannot say enough about the thrill I experienced with the ongoing conversations. I always thrive on discussions with art-loving individuals. There is never a question or comment that annoys me; I love to hear others’ views on the art experience. And this year, the crowds certainly did not let me down. There was never a lonely moment.

I have no experience in starting Facebook groups, but this morning I’m giving it a shot. I’ve titled it David Tripp Artists’s Cafe. It’s a public group that anyone can join, and my hope is to generate conversations about any aspect of art. My inspiration for this was spawned by the number of artists’s cafes I’ve read about in art history. The French Impressionists had their Cafe Guerbois. Picasso had his Els Quatre Gats, Hemingway held court at Les Deux Magots, The Ash Can School gathered at Robert Henri’s studio at 806 Walnut Street in Philadelphia, Alfred Stieglitz was a magnet at 291 5th Avenue in New York City, and the Abstract Expressionists (or New York School) met at the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village. I have always loved gathering in cafes or taverns with like-minded creatives, and now hope I could generate such conversations on Facebook. If any of you are interested and unable to find the group, please reach out to me. I’d love to welcome you.

Gotta get back to the task. 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.

Digging Up Bones, Late in the Night

My New Exhibit at Studio 48 Gallery in Arlington’s Gracie Lane Boutiques

We will all return to the Bateau-Lavoir. We were never truly happy except there.

Pablo Picasso in 1945, quoted in Picasso and the Painting That Shocked the World, by Miles J. Unger

I did some of the best work of my life there.

Robert Motherwell, reminiscing about his East Hampton years, 1944-1952, quoted in Robert Motherwell: The East Hampton Years, 1944-1952, by Phyllis Tuchman

I am on dangerous ground. My mind wants to gild my memories. It wants to present the past in soft focus, as muzzy and sentimental as a greeting card. It doesn’t want to remember the long days spent drinking . . . No, I cannot afford to romance my past. It does not serve me. To stay emotionally sober, I must focus the lens of my perceptions clearly on the now.

Julia Cameron, Finding Water: The Art of Perseverence

I am up past midnight in my sacred Studio Eidolons. Sandi is busy in the other room, and I feel the warmth and camaraderie of her presence. The next two days will seem frenetic, as we organize, pack and load for a 6:00 a.m. arrival Friday at the Dallas Arboretum. But we’ve been here before, many times, and panic is not in our psyches. I’m enjoying the quiet of the night as jazz softly plays in my studio and I attempt to state my present mind in this blog.

The string of quotes above touch me deeply. I have read several times of artists in their senior years somehow pining to return to the way things were when they were younger. My sentiments, however, align with Julia Cameron in her Finding Water. I have no pretense about my life in 1987 when I was trying to figure out what direction to take. I’m posting a photo below of me in the back yard of my garage apartment in those days, posing before a completed acrylic on canvas of my hero Friedrich Nietzsche, laboring into the night. I miss my trim physique and full head of hair from those days, but that is all. I am not romanticizing those days. They were pure hell. I recently re-read my entire 1987 journal that recorded those torrid, suffering days, and all I can say tonight is Good Riddance.

I am happy to live closer to 2022, posted above. In 1987, I wondered if I could ever reach a calmer, more contemplative life as a creative. Now, retired after a successful teaching career, I’m happy to do what pleases me most, and grateful for the health and strength to set up an art booth and enjoy a quality festival atmosphere for a weekend.

And speaking of which–last night I was notified that I have been juried into the Trinidad Art Fest 2024 to be held in Colorado. I have been waiting this year to see if I could get in, and now we are making exciting plans to participate in this show July 12-14, and then journey on to South Fork, Colorado to enjoy the cool San Juan mountains. I’ll be ecstatic to return to the trout streams and play with some plein air watercolor activity. No, I don’t pine for the days I knew in 1987. I’m grateful I’ve been allowed to live to my seventieth year and enjoy the things we do now.

Trinidad Coffee Memories. Framed Watercolor

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.

Emerson: The Gold Standard

I have just turned seventy, and loving friends have sent an abundance of birthday greetings. This morning finds me reading Emerson before diving headlong into a weeklong task of packing my gear for the weekend’s Artscape 24 at the Dallas Arboretum. I’ll be in Booth #28, and I’m excited beyond measure. I have certainly begun this Monday aright, reading Emerson’s essay “Experience.”

My life changed in 1989 while attending a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute at University of North Texas. I had just completed my first of twenty-eight years as a high school teacher, and was chosen to participate in a nineteenth-century American study of Hawthorne, Thoreau, Whitman and Twain. It was then that I was introduced to the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and in 1992 was fortunate to attend a Summer Seminar at Oregon State University to study Emerson, Thoreau and Margaret Fuller. This New England sage became my most valued spiritual mentor from those days.

Years ago, I managed to purchase a first edition of Emerson’s Essays: Second Series, published in 1844. Though I’ve read this essay countless times, I decided this morning to read “Experience” in its entirety. I feel that I have been bathed in magic waters.

Our love of the real draws us to permanence, but health of body consists in circulation, and sanity of mind in variety or facility of association.

It was Emerson who convinced me in 1989 to live a Life of the Mind, to allow ideas to refresh my day-to-day existence. Reading this essay afresh once again reminded me to stick to this creed.

I have been shocked several times throughout my later years in life to run across friends from high school and college who had become mere shadows of what I had known before. During school days I had revered them as remarkable visionaries. Youthful and vibrant, they were leaders of their class, in intellect, in enthusiasm, so magnetic in their intense personalities. In later years I frequently found these heroes as wan, worn down by life. I wondered, what happened? Reading further in Emerson’s “Experience”–

We see young men who owe us a new world, so readily and lavishly they promise, but they never acquit the debt; they die young and dodge the account: or if they live, they lose themselves in the crowd.

And again . . .

Our friends early appear to us as representatives of certain ideas, which they never pass or exceed. They stand on the brink of the ocean of thought and power, but they never take the single step that would bring them there.

I would not expect any of my peers to remember much of me from high school and college. I know that in high school I felt inferior, though I knew I had artistic talent. In college, I became hungry to know more, to experience more. But I didn’t see myself as any kind of luminary. And then came graduate school and then nearly three decades in classrooms. Though there were low points in my life, I can look back and say with certainty that I never allowed boredom or lethargy to settle into my life; there was just too much out there to experience, to explore. And I still feel that way. I have no sympathy for those bored with life. There is no excuse. We will never be permitted to reach the pinnacle of knowledge or experience, but wow, what a rush to try! I am grateful today to be alive. To be healthy. And still to be interested.

Having written all that, I now turn to the task of organizing and packing. I just received my Load-In time for Friday–6 a.m. I’ll be ready.

Thanks for reading.

Finding Water on a Saturday Morning

Gallery at Redlands Lobby Window

For the past few weeks, I’ve been reading and following the basic program of Julia Cameron’s book Finding Water: The Art of Perseverence. I’ve never had trouble persevering in making art, and seldom feel “blocked” as far as creativity is concerned. But during Sandi’s recent illness, I’ve stopped my basic activities in the studio, and now that she is stronger, I find it difficult to get back into the saddle. Of course, I cannot feel the motivation to begin a new painting, because in less than a week I’ll be setting up my booth at the Dallas Arboretum for Artscape 24.

The forecast now hints that we’ll be soaking in rain throughout that weekend, and we are certainly soaked today, Saturday. So, I guess I can safely say I have found water, thanks Julia. But honestly, I don’t care if the festival rains; I’ve been through that many times, I have an excellent Trim Line Canopy tent that will keep out the water, and all I can do is hope the rain doesn’t chase the patrons away. If it does, I’ll have a couple of days of solitude to read inside the dry confines of my booth, sip coffee, and admire my display. Maybe I’ll even attempt some watercolor sketching on my easel. I’m leaning forward in anticipation of a splendid festival experience, sorry that I missed this one last year. I’ve been looking over my inventory, trying to decide what to include in this year’s display, and am leaning toward the one below:

Arkansas Repose. Framed Watercolor. 26 x 29″

I photographed this truck in Arkansas a few years back when I was en route to their Plein Air on the White River event. I’m happy to return this year as a juror, and will do a workshop during the week the event runs its course. I will of course take part in the plein air activity that I’ve missed in recent years. The Waxahachie plein air competition opened yesterday and will run through May. I’m looking forward to participating in that event as well, having already enrolled in it.

Here is what I just found in the Julia Cameron book that I’m enjoying at present:

Ours is a youth-oriented culture. We are trained by television and the media to focus on those who are young. Our pop stars are youngsters. Their fortunes are immense and their futures bright. We do not read much or hear much about life in the arts for older people. We do not have many role models for doing what we must do–and that is persevere.

I understand what Julia is saying, but that sentiment does not fit mine in the least. I know the media parades the youth pop stars, but thanks to YouTube as well as published books, those of us who wish it are able to pull up the examples of the older generation and draw inspiration from their mature works. For the last couple of decades, I have drunk deeply from the wells of Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth, Robert Motherwell in their final decades of life and productivity, and have been profoundly inspired by them. I have also pored over the biographies and writings of William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens and Larry McMurtry during their senior years, and their words still stir me daily. I have no doubt that my own work will not fall off as long as my health holds out (incidentally, I’m turning seventy this very day).

Thanks for reading. This Saturday, though soaked, is turning out to be an inspiring day for me.

Sifting Through the Debris

My Booth at Artscape 2022

There are memories of days of this sort, of wonderful driftings in and out of the crowd, of seeing and thinking. Where are the sketches that were made? Some of them are in dusty piles, some turned out to be so so good they got frames, some became motives for big pictures, which were either better or worse than the sketches, but they, or rather the states of being and understandings we had at the time of doing them all, are sifting through and leaving their impress on our whole work and life.

Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

With the Dallas Arboretum event one week away, I find myself today tidying my wreck of a studio so I can make it a legitimate workspace. In the adjoining room I have stacks and stacks of discarded art work from years past–some of it unfinished, some of it finished but not matted or framed, most of it forgotten. I’ve decided to look at all the discarded work to see if any of it can become part of my “A Team” to hang in the art booth next week. It’s not that I don’t have enough merchandise for the space. At last count I had 92 framed watercolors ready to hang. But I have seen all of those in Gallery at Redlands, Studio 48, and various art festivals where I’ve participated. I’m ready to see something new on the walls. And so, as I slog my way through this studio tidying, I lean forward with interested anticipation at what I’ll find as I did up the old bones of past work. If even one of them is deemed worthy of display, I’ll feel I have done something productive. I have a good supply of mats and frames ready to put on new work.

I’ll leave early in the morning to spend Saturday in Palestine’s Gallery at Redlands. At the end of the day, I’ll pack up some of the gallery’s furnishings for my booth the next weekend.

Thanks for reading. I’ll post more when I have more to report. Artscape will be April 27-28, and I’m getting ready to organize and load my gear for the event. I’d love to see you there!