The Rocklins

This is the preface to The Rocklins, by Harvey Fite and Tad Richards.

 During the early 1930s, Harvey Fite was moving away from his longtime dream of a career in the theater. But a passion still burned in him—as he wrote in his journals, “I must find a way to leave my footprint in the sands of time.”

He was moving inexorably toward sculpture. The epiphany had come to him when he was acting with a touring troupe called the Jitney Players, performing melodrama. While he was waiting backstage one night for his cue to go on, a wooden spool discarded by a seamstress rolled under his chair, and he picked it up.

 Good Texas farm boy (and jack of all trades for the theater company) that he was, he usually carried a jackknife with him, and on this night, he unclasped it and began whittling the spool.

 What he whittled that night is buried under the sands of time, as is that spool, but the impact it had on Fite, and on American art in the 20 th Century, was profound.

 But like the hero that his friend Joseph Campbell wrote about in his seminal Hero With a Thousand Faces, Fite was at first hesitant about accepting the call. He tried painting, And he wrote. He had written plays in college; he tried some short stories now,

 But soon Sculpture became his only muse, and he gave up writing, even in journals, until 1948, when he found himself drawn back to ink and paper again to create the character of a little boy who finds adventure and self-knowledge in the World of Stone, and through the spirits of the great stone-carving cultures.

 He named the boy after his young stepson—me—but Tad is really Harvey Fite himself, a young sculptor in awe of the classic traditions of stone-carving. Harvey was then nearing the end of his first decade of work on Opus 40, the great earthwork project in stone that was to consume the rest of his life.

 He looked briefly for a publisher, but he came to realize that the story was not quite developed, and he left to return to the stone in which he found his true voice, and in which he spoke so eloquently.

The Rocklins is a unique and invaluable look into Fite’s developing—and developed—philosophies of sculpture, including his love-hate relationship with the mastery of Michelangelo, his guarded optimism about the future of American art, and a vision of that footprint he hoped to leave in the sands of time, especially powerful now that carving in stone has become almost a lost art. Harvey Fite left his footprints, all right. But he left them in stone.

 I’ve done some work with plot and continuity, and a little of the adult Tad has crept into the character of young Tad, but the story is Harvey’s.

Tad Richards

Saugerties, NY

2009

Opus 40 is now in the middle of a fund drive to begin the crucially important work of restoring the hurricane-damaged portion of the sculpture.  Please donate to this campaign -- click the link here.

Artists Studio Tour

Saugerties Artists Studio Tour was this past weekend. I opened my studio for two days -- actually opening my studio only involves lifting the lid up on my laptop, so I compensate by turning the Barbara Fite Room of the House on the Quarry into a showroom.

Lizard

 Anyway, I met a nice bunch of people -- probably about a hundred visitors on each day, and a few sales. I don't really show my work in galleries very often, so the Art Tour is my main showcase.

Bunkhouse Guitar

Nude with Flower

 Here are a few pieces from this year, representing the different styles of work that I do. "Lizard" is 21st century pointillism, done with mouse and Microsoft Paint, background in Photoshop.
  "Bunkhouse Guitar" is my black and white faux-woodcut style, also with mouse and MS Paint, using the freeform shape too and the invert command.
  "Nude with Flower" is iPad, ArtStudio and finger.


In a conversation during the tour, I found myself remembering when I lived in New York in the 70s, and I'd find myself late at night on the subway, starting to notice some simple stick figures that someone was drawing on the black empty spaces where posters had not yet been put up. I was blown away by how good they were, and I kept telling myself I was going to come down one night with a razor blade and cut one of them out, to keep for my own. But I never got around to it. That's why I don't have an original Keith Haring in my collection.

Jazz portraits

A few more:

Ben Webster

James Moody

Gerry Mulligan

Jazz portraits

Recent additions to my jazz portrait gallery:

Big Mama Thornton

McCoy Tyner

Bennie Moten

iPad art

I've been working with iPad as an art tool, following the extraordinary trail blazed by David Hockney. I'm not that far along the trail, but I've been starting to feel my way through.

I've beem using ArtStudio. Hockney has said he uses several different programs, but most commonly Brushes. ArtStudio doesn't even make this list of the best programs, and maybe I'll experiment with a couple of others, but no one would list Microsoft Paint among the best programs for PC, and it's the one I use most.

The nice thing about iPad apps, as opposed to computer programs, is that they're cheap.

Artists of the 50s

Who were the greatest artists of the 1950s? Artists whose careers blossomed in the 50s, either reached their zenith or (in the case of artists with long careers) their first flowering? Peter Jones and I put this list together off the tops of our heads -- certainly we've forgotten people.


Allen Ginsberg
Bill Evans
Chuck Berry
Edward Albee
Elvis Presley
Fats Domino
Hank Williams
J. D. Salinger
Jackson Pollock
James Baldwin
Jerry Lee Lewis
John Updike
John Coltrane
Johnny Cash
Miles Davis
Robert Lowell
Sonny Rollins
Walt Kelly
Willem deKooning
Willie Dixon


All men, which probably says something negative about the way our minds work, but it also says something about the 50s. So who did we miss?

Transitions at The Gallery at Opus 40

Barbara Fite and Tom Penning

An old polaroid photo, recently discovered, of the great sculptor (and Opus 40 neighbor) Tomas Penning and my mother, Barbara Fite -- Harvey Fite's wife and the creator of the Opus 40 organization.

The American Century

I don't remember writing this, but I ran across it while looking for something else, and I decided it wasn't bad, so I'll reproduce it here, now that the disastrous Bush presidency is winding down, and dragging the American Century into ashes with it. Let's hope Obama proves a phoenix, and meanwhile, this must have been my New Century piece for the Woodstock Times, since that's the folder I found it in.

The US emerged from the American Century as the military superpower, the dominant mercantile power. And the arts? How did we compete on the world stage? A better question would be what did we contribute, but hey, it’s the fin du siecle Americain, so let’s go for it.

Because of the limitations of language, literature is always parochial. But Modernism, which dominated the first half century, brought American players to the world stage. In poetry, they included Pound (who encapsulated Modernism in three words: “Make it new”) and Eliot, but these colossi have faded in influence as the century wanes, to two of their contemporaries, Stevens and Williams. Actually, the American figure who most influenced international modernism in poetry was Whitman, whose work only began to be widely known as the century turned.

In fiction, the century belongs to Proust and Joyce, though Hemingway’s impact on short fiction is international. In drama, O’Neill was important, but the real American Century in drama happened between the 20s and the 50s, with the new musical theater of Kern, Gershwin, Porter, Berlin, Rogers and Hammerstein.

The last burst of modernism, in the 40s, was the first significant appearance of American painters on the world stage, an era that began with Pollock and the abstract expressionists, and ended with Warhol and the pop artists. One of the biggest stories of visual art in the century, though, was the collection of it, and the prices paid for it, which was an American/imperial/mercantile-driven phenomenon.

Dance is something we mostly imported, except for modern dance, where Duncan, Graham and Cunningham defined world forms.

Movies are the American form (starting with British immigrant Chaplin), and in film it’s been so totally an American century that one starts looking for exceptions. How many Americans have the vision of Bergman, Fellini, Truffaut, Kurosawa? But with the probable exception of Bergman, their influences were American.

In music, it’s been an American century, and the course of music is perhaps the most instructive. Armstrong was one of the most important figures of High Modernism, though no one knew it at the time. Music in the first half-century was assimilationist, European immigrants like Gershwin and Berlin consciously trying to make an American tradition.

But a funny thing happens to imperial cultures. They become dominant through military/mercantile might, and at a certain point, they begin to realize that they may have lost their souls, and at that point, they often turn to the cultures they’ve subjugated. So it was with America: the empire strikes back, and from the most systematically oppressed American subculture came the greatest American art form, the most important world art form of the 20th Century: the blues, jazz, rhythm and blues, rock and roll. I’ll go out with a few names: Armstrong, Handy, Smith, Ellington, Johnson, Leadbelly, Jordan, Holiday, Parker, Coltrane, Domino, Williams, Little Richard, Presley, Franklin, Mayfield.

Film Noir

I'm self-publishing my collection of Film Noir drawings, featuring three stories -- The Lineup, Kiss Me Deadly, and The Big Heat. I've posted some of the drawings here in the past, but I think this is a very good looking collection. You can order it here.

Countdown to Saugerties Artists Studio Tour

Pick up a map around town, and make plans to see what Saugerties has to offer in a wide variety of art forms. Here are a few more reasons to take the tour:

Allen Bryan's unsettling photographs capture the world you're afraid may be out there, or the world that you wish was out there.

Leslie Bryce's sculptures make ordinary spaces less ordinary.



Steve Crohn's abstractions bend space.

Countdown to Saugerties Artists Studio Tour

The high point of Saugerties' art season -- the Saugerties Artists' Studio Tour. It's this Saturday and Sunday, August 16th and 17th, from 10-5. On Friday the 15th, from 5-7, the opening of the group show at the Opus 40 Gallery.

Already, you can see several artists' work on display at the Shelley K. Gallery and the Michael Nelson Gallery, both on Partition Street in Saugerties, and in store windows throughout town (I'm in the Muddy Cup/Inquiring Mind window, otherwise known as the Muddy Mind).

So to count down to the tour, I'm going to preview a few of the tour artists here, starting with Barbara Bravo, the guiding and inspiring spirit without whom there'd be no tour.

From her web page:

The concept for my signature work emerged when I realized how much pleasure I get from surrounding myself with flowers. In combining my two passions, pottery and flowers, I have been able to create a variety of styles and forms that are both functional and decorative. Often the forms are altered, added-to or cut-away from and when I'm satisfied with the basic form, hand sculpted flowers, leaves or other design elements are added. We are pleased to offer a variety of items in 13 categories for use in home decor and as gifts.

Barbara's images are protected, so you'll have to go to her web site to see them, but they're well worth it.

Not Bloody Enough

How do I create these images? (For the show advertised below.) It's kind of a technique of my own invention. When Rachel Loden and I were doing "Affidavit," my art work for that was black and white, drawn directly on my computer screen using Microsoft Paint and one tool -- the one called "free-form select," shaped like a star on your MSPaint toolbox. I'd draw a shape, then invert it (using a little trick I had to discover -- you can't just invert with MSPaint), and keep working positive and negative space against each other until I had an image I liked. It's the same technique I use for the Film Noir images.

Then, because Rachel's amazing poem was about a gruesome murder, I decided I'd put some blood into each picture, which meant adding red, which scared me a little, because I'd always worked in black and white, and had no confidence in my ability to use color. So I started sending the new bloody images to Rachel, and she kept responding "Great! But not bloody enough." So I kept changing the color, looking for ever-gorier shades of red. Which should have been relatively easy -- you just take the paint bucket tool, and pour the new red over the old. (Note: this image has one of the early, discarded blood colors -- can't locate where I filed the final version at the moment.)

Except it wasn't. I discovered that MSPaint was an inefficient program that could not save color true. Once you saved an image, when you retrieved it, the middle of it was true, but it pixillated around the edges. It became discolored, mottled, and the new color wouldn't cover that part. None of this is a problem with PhotoShop, but fortunately I didn't have PhotoShop then, so I had to work with the frustration, and ultimately get it to work for me. While the mottled effect was driving me nuts for "Affidavit," it was also intriguing me, and it occurred to me that if you worked with dots of color, and saved frequently, every part of the image would have that effect. So I gathered up all my courage and made the jump into color -- computer pointillism, beginning an image with separated dots of color, and gradually merging them.

It is a horribly painstaking process -- each one of these can take up to three months to finish. But it keeps me off the streets.

Exhibition Opening

The Naked Blogger

What to make of this? Best not to wonder about it too much. I was looking at my stat keeper this morning, for no particularly good reason, and discovered that someone had surfed into my blog after doing a search for "Wendy Jones nude."

Wendy Jones -- Wendell Jones -- was a close friend of my youth, tragically dead while we were still barely more than youths. His father, also Wendell Jones, a wonderful artist who also died too young, in the 1950s. I had written about Wendy Jones, Senior, and his studies for the San Francisco Post Office mural, the last great mural competiton of the WPA, on the same blog page where I'd also written about some of my nude paintings. So that can't have satisfied our searcher much.

The only Google hit ahead of me was the Victoria and Albert Museum, and an entry about potter/transvestite/documentarian Grayson Perry, and his biographer Wendy Jones. This Wendy Jones, in the bio, quotes Peery telling an anecdote of his youth:

We used to spend many hours snogging and fondling – nothing more – to Roy Orbison on a velour sofa. One night one of the kids came downstairs while we were lying there in the nude. Years later I found out from the parents, ‘Yes, he remembered that.’

Next, a blogger named Paul Katcher who has a note on a Wendy the Snapple Lady doll, and "andruw jones nude" -- Your source for naked center fielders!

This last comes from Katcher having the same unhealthy interest that I do -- wondering what odd combinations of search terms bring people to his list. Funny stuff, as he comments on each search term. Woner what he'll have to say about "Wendy Jones nude."

So I don't know if any of these sites helped our searcher much, but there's a valuable lesson to be learned for all of us: if you put the word "nude" in your blog, you're going to get a lot of extraneous hits. I also got one for "40 nude wives."

So what am I going to label this post? Nudes? I think not. I like trouble, but not that much.

Opus 40 on Wikipedia

This was more of an adventure than I expected it to be -- certainly more than I would have hoped for.

There was a Wiki entry on Opus 40, and it was pretty good, with a couple of errors. But also,the entry was pretty short, and there was a lot more that could be said, so Iended up pretty much rewriting the whole piece. That was the easy part. I posted it to Wikipedia, and it was promptly rejected, for violation of the original sources and conflict of interest guidelines. Conflict of interest because of being related to Harvey, and Original Source because I didn't reference already published material, which is apparently a no-no. And one that makes sense in most cases, but not in this one. As I wrote, disputing the decision,

• If my information on Opus 40 is unsourced, then all information on Opus is unsourced, because I am the original source of all of it. If you'll check the link that's up there now, to the New York Times article, you'll see that it is entirely based on an interview with me.

This did not impress my censor, who responded,

Did you read the original research and conflict of interest guidelines?

I followed it up with:

Yes, but in this case they don't make sense. You'll allow the Opus 40 website, which I wrote, to be used as a source, and you'll allow the New York Times article, which is entirely based on an interview with me and quotes me extensively, as a source, but you won't allow me to correct errors that those secondary sources made?

And yes, I am a descendant of Harvey Fite, but this has not stopped every other piece of literature written about Opus 40, from the sources you've quoted to numerous other newpaper and magazine articles, and chapters from various books, from using me as a wource. I know more about the subject than anyone eise.

By this time, the guy had lost interest in me, and didn't respond at all. So I decided that I would post my new bio of Harvey on the Opus 40 website, so that I could then refer to it, and I'd get Peter Jones, who has the creds as a professor of fine art, to submit it.

I got as far as rewriting the Opus 40 website, but then Wikipedia did an about face, thanks to an online friend who does a lot of stuff for them, and posted my entry, which you can read there now. In posting it to the website, I expanded it a little more, and I think it's pretty good now. You can judge for yourself.

John R. Tunis, Leadbelly, Howard Koch

What authors or books influenced you most? People are discussing this on the NewPo list, and I sat down to write about my biggest influences. Pretty soon, I realized this was getting too long for a post to a listserv, in spite of the fact that there are only three names on it. It's also probably irrelevant to a poetry list, since none of these are poets. I'll think about poet-influences next. Here are the three.


1. The baseball novels of John R. Tunis. In Tunis' novels, like The Kid From Tomkinsville, I first became aware of a writer behind the words -- I could feel someone writing it, injecting his own passion and personality into the story. I remember telling my mother one day when I was maybe 11 or 12, and had never particularly thought about growing up to be a writer, "When I grow up to be a writer, and people ask me about the greatest influence on my writing career, I'm going to say John R. Tunis. Although I didn't realize it at the tme, he was also teaching me my first lesson in telling a great, fast-paced story with vivid memorable characters, that also had a message. Tunis didn't bludgeon you with the message. In Keystone Kids, the main driving force of the novel is baseball, young shortstop Spike Russell being named player-manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and trying to guide his team to the pennant. but the missing ingredient is a catcher, and the Dodgers bring up a talented kid from the minors -- talented and Jewish. Spike has to deal with prejudice from teammates (this was written four years before Jackie Robinson), anti-Semitism from fans and sportswriters, and his own total lack of experience in reaching out to another culture. This is from memory, over 50 years ago. I did pick up a copy of the The Kid Comes Back at a yard sale recently, and it still held my interest. Great baseball stuff, and again, more. Roy Tucker, The Kid From Tomkinsville, now a major league veteran, enlists to fight in World War II, is injured in combat, and has to find the courage (and ultimately, a chiropractor) to get him through the injury and back to help the Dodgers in their stretch run. But before that, he's shot down in France, rescued by a Resistance group that seems more than little Communist, and Roy has to battle his own middle-American prejudice to accept these people who are saving his life. Then, he has to face the culture shock and resistance that all returning GIs must face, in that war and every other -- what Kipling talks about in "Tommy Atkins."

I realized how deep Tunis was still ingrained in me when I started to write a children's sports book for my grandson Josh, in which he and his friend go back in time and meet Pele. And I realized I was beiong drawn to do what Tunis did -- tell an exciting sports story, but never forget that it's also about something more.






2. Leadbelly, for the reasons mentioned in my last post. He first taught me about compression of words, about the power of what's left out, about saying more with less. I found Leadbelly when Probably "In the Pines" was the first song to hit me that way -- the girl whose tragedy we only glimpse, but we feel the immensity of it behind the stark, sparse words. It was only years later, when I began teaching Leadbelly's lyrics, that an important part of her tragedy hit me -- why she's lost her home, why she had to sleep in the pines. She lives in company housing in a company town, and the company takes back the house when her husband is killed in an on-the-job accident.

It was when I started teaching him, all those years later, when I put together my Literature of the Blues course, that I realized how powerful his influence still was, and had been for all of my writing life. Ashbery only provided a continuation of that influence, but more on that when I get to the list of poet-influences.

3. Howard Koch. Howard died in 1995, and I was honored to be asked to give one of the eulogies for him. Because Howard had been mentor and role model to all of those of my generation who grew up in the 50s and 60s, I made myself their voice, and collected stories and reminiscences from them. Here's one from my brother Jonathan, who recalled hearing the name of producer Howard W. Koch in connection with some current movie or other, and asking Noelle Gillmor (a name for another reminiscence), "Is Howard W. Koch the same as our Howard Koch?" Noelle replied, "The relationship between our Howard Koch and Howard W. Koch is roughly the same as the relationship between Jesus Christ and Jesus H. Christ."

But I digress, not for the first time. What I did say, for myself, at Howard's memorial, was that I knew Howard was a great man before I knew he was a great writer. I knew him for his kindness, his intelligence, his integrity, his keen and piercing insights into politics, society, and hypocrisy. So those were my first lessons in writing from Howard, and they're still among the most important that I've ever learned.

Later, I found out about Casablanca, and Sergeant York, and The Sea Hawk. And then I was probably 18, or maybe older, and already serious about becoming a writer. That's when I learned my other lesson from Howard -- that truth can have a heart, and a soul. That if something is romantic, and wonderful, and uplifting, that doesn't negate its truth -- it creates its own special kind of truth.

And there you have it.