Monday, December 9, 2019

A Work in Progress


A Work in Progress


Coming up with a post for The Lost Canyon Project was a relatively easy matter. The Project was creating a catalog of Pete Hampton’s paintings. The blog was a weekly chronicle of my progress.

The Lost Era Transcripts is a much more difficult undertaking. I have a selection of 828 paintings by Pete Hampton to match up with the fragments of “The Lost Era” narrative. Well over a hundred of these paintings were specifically done as scenes for “The Lost Era” slide show. Many other paintings in the archives were done specifically for Pete’s other work, “The Lost Canyon Trip”. I remember Pete showed me a lot of “The Lost Era” stuff, complete with scary story and sound effects. I saw “The Lost Canyon Trip” show several times.

But that was over forty years ago.  Nonetheless, seeing these small paintings again, and then transcribing the material from Pete’s notebook tapped into some deep veins of memory, and I saw dozens of the Lost Era pictures fall right in line with the stories as written.  Stranger yet, I seem to have no trouble telling early from later work, no trouble separating Lost Canyon from Lost Era stuff, and I can tell right away which paintings of the Puente Hills are from La Habra, and which ones are from Whittier, just a  few miles to the west.
Even so, it is a slow business selecting paintings, cropping, and squaring the photographs, and matching them to the text. I won’t necessarily have a new episode done each week.



The text, too, has its problems as we saw with the first installation. It was my original intention to leave Pete’s narrative exactly as I found it. I discussed this with Pete’s brother Richard. Quirky and odd as the writing is, to Richard or to me it sounded just like talking to Pete. His descriptions of La Habra made perfect sense to us because we lived there. Without that frame of reference the writing becomes quite opaque.

I had the good fortune to receive some excellent feedback and advice from Gerard Vanderleun of  (best  site on the internet) AmericanDigest.  When Vanderleun tells you, “Edit the text.” you edit the text. Thank you, Mr. V.

But “edit the text” is not like “crop the picture”. “Edit the text” adds layers of brain work, and decision making to the job. It also puts me into a whole new dimension of responsibility, as well as making the work itself go much slower. All part of a work in progress. My readers should find the narrative clearer, tighter, and easier to follow in subsequent installations. The next story from The Lost Era Transcripts will go on line as soon as it is ready. Thanks for stopping by.

UPDATE:
One final note: Thank you to the people who stopped by, and left comments on last week's Lost Era post. Unfortunately, when I went to edit the post, Blogger went all wonky on me. I lost the whole post, comments included, and had to start over from scratch.


Monday, November 4, 2019

A Note From the Scribe


A Note From the Scribe

 

NEXT WEEK:

The Lost Era Transcripts 

UPDATED 12/5/2019


Welcome to The Lost Canyon Project. This post marks one year of the Lost Canyon Project Blog being on line here at Blogspot.
If you are new to the blog  or are just visiting, you may feel like you’re stepping into the middle of an odd, and pointless story. You may wonder what exactly is going on here.

I,  J.W. MacLean, am your narrator. The subject  at hand is the artwork, shows, and stories of my late friend, Pete Hampton. (1940—2018)
 Pete was a painter of Nature. The subject matter of his paintings was the Puente Hills in mid-century La Habra Heights, and Whittier California. He created shows of his work as part of his life-long crusade to save the hills from development. Pete was one of a kind. He was an eccentric genius, the genuine item, in real life.

I  met Pete in 1963 when I was 11 years old, but I had lost contact with him over the years, and by 2017 I had not seen Pete in over 15 years’ time.  
 August of 2017 I accepted an invitation to join my wife and her friends on a trip to The Sawdust Festival in Laguna Beach. Accepting that invitation was the first step into a wildly improbable, almost  eerie web of coincidences that led to me searching for, and finding Pete Hampton, and then coming into possession of his entire body of artwork.
The story of how I found Pete, and all that follows, including how this project came into being begins:

  HERE: [link]

The first part of The Lost Canyon Project  was photographing, and creating a catalog of the nearly 900 paintings and drawings that Pete left.
Now, with that complete, and the blog at the one year mark, the task has changed.


 I and many other people believe that Pete Hampton deserves a place among California’s, and indeed, America’s great  regional painters. We see in this work a transcendent quality that sets it in the realm of genius. I talk to Richard and Geri Hampton, as well as a few other people about this. Sometimes we jokingly refer to ourselves as “The Believers.”


  Of course, the goal of The Lost Canyon Project is to see Pete Hampton gain the recognition that  we believe he deserves.
My wife and I are speaking to people, and working the contacts that we have in the art community. Truth to tell, we’ve left some few people very impressed, but nothing has played out any further. We’re still workin’ on it.


And at this point in the project I don’t have anything as exciting to show as a new archive of paintings that haven’t been seen in decades. Nonetheless,  I am working on something wonderful.


As I mentioned, Pete Hampton created shows of his work. Pete’s shows were strange affairs, consisting of hundreds of slides of his paintings along with a narrative, and sound track on reel to reel tape.

 His major work, a story about the Whittier Hills called "The Lost Canyon Trip", is intact. We have all the slides and tapes. But it is Pete’s other project, the never completed Lost Era show, that has become my focus for now. The Lost Era is the story of Pete Hampton's early childhood in the hills above La Habra California in the early 1940's.

Last November when I was going through the second archive of paintings I discovered the pictures from Pete’s nightmare story “The Deep Dark Hole”. Now, jump back to 1964. Pete used to scare the hell out of us kids with this weird story and the hideous pictures that went with it.


What we did not realize, then, was that the nightmare story was a segment from the larger Lost Era show. Similarly, when I discovered the Deep Dark Hole story written out in longhand in Pete’s journal, I transcribed just the monster stuff. I left the rest of the notebook for later, and moved on with the photography project.


But when I got back to the notebook, recently, I discovered that a great deal, if not all of the Lost Era narrative is written out in very neat longhand, in pencil on looseleaf paper. I also discovered that I had missed a lot of material in the haste of just working through the project.



 Later on in the photography I also discovered the eleventh Archive, which is a treasure trove of Lost Era paintings.
So the task at hand is transcribing the Lost Era texts, and matching Pete’s narrative with the paintings as best I can. It is slow going.
When I have completed enough of the work in progress I will, of course, share it here on the Lost Canyon Project.

In the meanwhile the blog will continue to feature a new painting from the Catalog each Monday morning.
Thank you for stopping by.
J.W. MacLean

Monday, October 28, 2019

A Little Horror





This week’s post is going to be light on text and long on grizzly.
It’s Halloween week.
Pete Hampton loved nature and beauty. But he had a Poe-like fascination for horror, and the macabre as well. And nothing he saw filled the bill like Tobe Hooper’s low budget horror masterpiece, “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
Pete liked it so much he painted these:
Enjoy





Not from TCM, but horrible, just the same...


 Happy Halloween.