All That's Fit to Print

All That's Fit to Print 

<Last week: Bringing It All Back Home 

 

 

This week's paintings are from Archive 14, the last collection of Pete Hampton’s work.

I think I  wrote earlier, that haste is seldom your friend. It’s also one of my many faults. I had the Word document for the catalog completed. It totaled 827 paintings, drawings and sketches, at 470 pages.(Originally counted at 828 paintings. There was a duplicate picture in the file.) 
I proofread and proofread again until I was sure it was ready, and dropped the file off at the printer’s.

So, guess what happened next.

I called the shop in the afternoon, and the guy told me he was having some trouble with his machines. The catalog would be ready in the morning. Then, around 7:30 that night, I got one of those horrible, “OH-OH” moments. I checked the Word file on the computer, and.... Oh. 
Dammit.
 Anyway. 
Just what I thought. (John, you IDIOT!) 
I called the shop number, and left a message, hoping I was in time.
 I  wasn’t.

So I picked up the catalog the next morning. All the screw-ups that I made, and too late remembered, stood out like neon. It turned what should have been a professional looking piece into an amateur effort, and an expensive one at that. It took four more days of tedious editing to get it right. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that, even with the errors, the overall project looked much better than I had hoped. The corrected final draft will go to the printer this week. This phase of the project is complete.

I am not sure what the next phase of this project will be. I have some ideas, but final decisions are not in my hands.

 Some few of the posts here on The Lost Canyon Project, most notably, “The Deep Dark Hole” post will soon be taken off line this week, and returned to “draft” for re-editing.

In the meanwhile, The Lost Canyon Project blog will continue every Monday morning. There is a huge gallery of work here, and I’ve shown only a sample. Each week  we’ll get a look at a handful Pete Hampton's works, but with less chatter from your humble narrator.
More next week.

Thanks for stopping by.

Bringing It All Back Home

Bringing It All Back Home

<Last week: Monsters in the Dark

It has been several months since I last made a trip to the storage locker. Traffic was light on Lambert Road, and I hit almost all green lights on the drive. I had two cartons in the truck, archives 9 & 10 in one box, and archives 12 & 13 in the other. I had to leave archive 11 at the house, but by the end of the morning that turned out to be a good thing. Small coincidences continue to weave their way through this endeavor.

I brought home the last collection, which totaled 20 paintings, some of them framed. I also brought back the boxes of bagged up xerox copies of notes, letters, and stuff that I can describe only as ‘Pete’s last mad ravings’.

So last Monday night I set up the lights, pulled the shades in the den, and got the last of Pete Hampton’s work photographed.  

 The total count comes to eight hundred twenty eight paintings, drawings, and sketches. All that remains of this part of the project is the catalogue entries. I’ll have that done this week.

And then?

We shall see.

I’ve recorded everything that Pete had stored away in his private collections. I’ve spent a lot of time reading his notebooks, his inscriptions, his notes. I’ve seen a lot of stuff that in all probability no one else has seen. And I’ve spent the last year searching the deep archives of my own life, recalling incidents, events, stories.

The trip down Memory Lane is fun for only the first couple of blocks. Stay on that street long enough and you get to the bad neighborhoods where your every cringe inducing recollection is a pothole in an unpaved alley. I do believe I’ve revisited my every embarrassing moment from 1968 to about 1980. I didn’t see this coming.

I tend toward tunnel vision in my work. I lock in on task, and don’t allow myself to get sidetracked. I’ve been so focused on the process of getting these digital archives together that small details of significance slip out from under my notice.

 Old B36, 1947 on a summer day

 Like the dates on Pete’s paintings, for example. Of course, I have recorded the dates on the pictures that are dated, but Pete didn’t often put dates on his work.

The dates on most of Pete’s completed paintings run from the early 60’s to somewhere around 1983 or 84. And this roughly coincides with the years in which I, and my other friends kept regular contact with Pete. It was for us, a time of growing out of adolescence and into adulthood. Pete was closing in on 40, and edging into middle-age. He belonged to a world we were reluctantly outgrowing.  Like when we were grade school kids, helping Pete promote his “Lost Canyon Trip” show. Eventually saving the hills slid off the list of critical stuff to worry about. Our lives became centered around jobs, and the day-today business of life. It became easier and easier to say, “Hey we haven’t seen Pete in a while, gotta’ give him a call.” But not just now...

Not just now…

We’ll have some more from the 14th archive next week, and perhaps I’ll post pics of the paintings in my private collection. I did not expect to be done with this phase so soon, and to be honest, I do not know what will come next. Just like when I was getting started, I am in unexplored territory. Still, I have the conviction that there is a greater hand guiding this endeavor toward a purpose I can not yet see.  Do the footwork. Say your prayers. Leave the results to God. and so we continue.

next week: All that's Fit to Print>

Monsters in the Dark

Monsters in the Dark

<Last Week:The Long Night

 

 

Once again, I had a week dominated by a domestic project which involved shovels, dirt, hundreds of concrete curbstones, and pavers, and nothing that remotely resembled either assistance, or fun. But I did complete the clerical stuff on archive 13. The catalogue is up to date with 808 entries at 500 pages even. 

And just to set my obsessive compulsive teeth on edge, the last two packing boxes will fit archives 9 and 10, and archives 12 and 13 perfectly , but there is no way I can fit archive 11 in a box and have room for anything else.

 So that means that tomorrow, when I go down to the storage I have to leave archive 11 here and come home with a box for it so I can take it back later.  I wanted to take all the completed work to the storage in order, and in one trip. But I’m just getting silly over pointless details. Welcome to The Lost Canyon Project.

With this archive, all of the collected works from Pete Hampton’s shows and stories are recorded. I took great care to catalogue the paintings in the order that Pete stored them, but it soon became apparent that many of the sequences were scattered over several collections. There is material for “The Deep Dark Hole” in archive 11. The Pigrat sequence for today’s post was likewise scattered across several collections. Similarly, Jeff’s encounter with the old lady in Rideout Heights is spread out in several archives. As I mentioned, I’ll be going to the storage Monday morning. By next week we should have pictures from the last collection of large assorted works.

A visit to Pete’s hut in the Lost Canyon was more than an overnight camp-out, and all night bull session with your best pal.  The Whittier Hills was a world of  pristine beauty in the day, and the realm of monsters and nightmares after dark. In previous posts we’ve seen visits from the mangled corpse of Joseph the oilman, in “The Terrible Thing”. We've seen the attack of the Monster from “The Midnight Terror.” We’ve seen the Telehonepolies, strange hostile birds from “The Lost Era”, and had an encounter with Green Mist that left a man hanging headless from a tree.

But somehow, the Pigrat from “The Lost Canyon Trip” was Pete’s favorite mythical creature. When Pete talked about his show, he seldom failed to mention the frightening and fatal encounter with this unheard-of animal.

Part of the reason for the overnight camp-out in “The Lost Canyon Trip”,   was that Pete wanted to trap a California Thrasher. How does one trap a bird? Easy. Box. Bait. Stick. String. Just like in The Roadrunner. Only it really can work. (Pete did trap his bird.) But back to the camp-out.

 Something late at night is raiding the bird trap.

 Whatever it is, it's big!

 Staring Pigrat/ as big as a cocker spaniel/ climax shot/ #10

“Pig-rat/ It collapsed, It’s dead, Jeff, died of fright! Probably never saw a person before. I wonder??/shot # 14”

 

  

Why not, indeed? And then there was the even more mysterious White Pigrat:

Strange white Pig-Rat in oilwell hills / Strange white pig-rat like animal disappearing off a lonely road in the oilwell hills/ $15.

Next week: Bringing It All Back Home>