OGP Collection Update, Summer 2014

August 1, 2014 Nicole Poole

Yeesh. Finally, an update. I'm "busier than a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest," as Dad would say. Momentum is rolling, and, dammit, I will create a legacy for Dad. The big news is that the cataloguing process for the paintings is complete! (The pastels, charcoals, sketchbooks and sculptures are another story...) oh damn.

Without the help of Julie & Farrel Droke, Mark & Becky Wilson, Cathy & Ron Crabtree, Susan & Keith Frank, JJ Bradford, Brent Swift, Terri Jordan and Skip Hill, this wouldn't have happened until 2016.

Cataloguing artwork is a tedious process. Measuring each piece, describing the medium, image, condition, provenance, etc., taking photos, entering the information into the database...it's daunting, but I suppose it's like eating an elephant. (Or a tree, if you're a vegetarian.) But we're finished with phase 1, and that's a huge milestone.

Despite the glee of this, I woke up in the middle of the night last month in a cold sweat. "Oh sh%t. What now?!" I thought. Cataloguing was my biggest goal, and to be faced with its completion was spooky, to say the least. I didn't have a plan of how to get from cataloguing to taking Poole worldwide.

I began with creating a Facebook page, which you should absolutely check out. You'll get a "Poole a Day" in your newsfeed. Over 1500 people have already signed on, and it's just thrilling to watch people discover Dad's work.

I've also begun working with the intrepid, beautiful and "wicked smaht" Debby Williams, one of the heaviest heavy hitters in the world of Oklahoma arts. She was a dear friend of Dad's, and I've known her for over 20 years - luckily she's accustomed to the Poole idiosyncrasies!

We've got plans and schemes to bring Poole to the widest possible audience, including a huge show and sale, and stuff is really starting to roll. I'll shout it from the rooftops once we get a few more things nailed down.

Next: President of the University of Oklahoma, David L. Boren, has graciously accepted Dad's painting "Morning Meeting," and further, upon his retirement, he will donate it to the Fred Jones, Jr. Museum of Art as part of their permanent collection.

President Boren is one of the most intelligent and forward-thinking men I've ever had the pleasure of meeting, and it is our great fortune that he continues to lead.

I found several pieces of correspondence between Dad and President Boren. Dad respected him greatly for his efforts in steering our University, our state, and our nation. It's a great honor for me and our family to know that Dad's work will continue on at the University of Oklahoma.

One of these days, I swear I will create and endow The O. Gail Poole Scholarship scholarship at OU. I want artists from small towns across the world to be able to study art, in Dad's name. From Slapout, Oklahoma to Bauchi, Nigeria...somehow, some way, I will make this happen.

Finally: Please consider a couple of clicks and a couple of bucks to help fund the O. Gail Poole Memorial Travel Fund. I am determined to keep this going, and to spread it to a statewide level. Give an opportunity to those far flung "Van Gotebo" artists to experience this wide blue world.

Anyhoo. That's the news from in the trenches, and swinging for the fences.

Thanks so very much for reading. All the best,

Nicole

I Got the Horse Right Here...

April 11, 2014 Nicole Poole

I realize my posts have been quite reflective of late, so this is short, sweet, and a very exlclusive way for you to connect with the guy I knew as Dad. Since I was a baby, Dad sang to me the opening lines of "Fugue for Tinhorns," from Guys and Dolls. He sang "can do, can do" each time either of us tried to do something challenging...

This is a voicemail Dad left for me a few years ago when I was studying at the Art Students' League. Hearing his voice is so damned soothing to me, and listening to him ramble a little about travel and recollection while cleaning his pistol is hysterical.

After you listen to this, please note that we found about 26 pounds of ammunition around the house after he passed away. Can do, can do...

Art, travel, love and guns. Hee.

Over and out for now. Thanks so much for following and for getting to know my amazing Dad.

Nicole

Cowboys and Indians

November 22, 2013 Nicole Poole

When Dad began painting full-time, he was fascinated with iconic Southwestern figures. Of Choctaw heritage but raised in a farming community, Dad frequented pow-wows and honky tonks, wearing a turquoise ring and watchband...along with his Tony Lamas and Stetson.

Dad frequented Southwestern art exhibits, but soon grew tired of them as his focus changed to honing his skills rather than honoring his heritage. Most of his cowboy paintings from that era were delegated to a shed in the back yard, and he eventually burned all but one of them. (Eventually I may post it, as it's quite good, but because he cringed at it, I'll do him the respect of holding off.)

The works featuring Native Americans, however, were mainly done in pastels, and they got to stay around. For his props, he built miniature canoes and teepees with hide and rabbit-skin glue.

In the 1980's, Dad moved from traditional, historical depictions to more spiritual reflections; he acquired many horned skulls, a peace pipe, hawk feathers and medicine stick and began to explore both extant lore and his own imagination.

Coming full circle, a couple of years ago he again became fascinated with cowboys & Indians. He painted many stylized pieces reflecting General Custer, his boyhood hero, EJ, and native american warriors.

Appropos to a full life immersed in the Southwest narritive, the day of his death he was given a sage and cedar ceremony by a Comanche elder, and later visited by the Bradley Boys, Stetsons, boots and all.

Poole in Arles

September 20, 2013 Nicole Poole

Dad wandered around the town of Arles like a kid in a candy store, stopping and holding his hands, formed into a frame, up to his eyes....he could see what Van Gogh, his hero, saw. He alternated between hooting with glee and openly weeping at the emotions running through him.

This painting is titled "Plaza at Arles," from a photo he took during that time. I believe this to be the beginning of his Van Gogh-influenced pieces.

We were there in 2001, during a 3-week hiatus from my tour with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Mom & Dad came to Europe, and one of our most memorable stops was Arles, a beautiful town deep in Provence, where Van Gogh spent the majority of his time and painted some of his most memorable works.

In fact, Dad, in typical Poole fashion, deviated from The Plan and decided to stay in Provence, to see for himself the landscapes seen by his heroes, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Monet, Manet, etc.

So Mom and I went on to Barcelona. But that's a story for a different day.

Thanks for reading.

Nicole

Behind the Mask

August 13, 2013 Nicole Poole

"It must have been hard for you, to be this swirly, sensitive, Dionysic creative thing...stuffed into a John Wayne suit."

I said this to Dad at the end of March as he rested in his favorite old recliner; he was beginning to "head for the barn," and was sleeping constantly, but preferred to be in the living room rather than in his bed so that he could feel like part of the action. I often rubbed his temples to soothe him, and our discussions during these periods will always stay with me.

In response to my musing, Dad grunted and grinned, mustering his strength to say, slowly, "honey, you have no idea."

This came to me today, fitting, as it marks the 4 month anniversary of Dad's one-way trip to Happy Mountain. Masks were a recurring theme in Dad's work, and I've been doing a lot of thinking as to why.

Joseph Campbell wrote: “To become—in Jung’s terms—individuated, to live as a released individual, one has to know how and when to put on and to put off the masks of one’s various life roles."

Dad was born in Marlow, Oklahoma and raised in Bradley, Oklahoma, both small farming communities. With his own father out of the picture, Dad's views of what a man should be were fomented by the people around him. They worked hard, went to church, knew how to tell a good joke, protected their families and served their country. Life was hard, but simple by today's modern standards. The community supported each other, and your roots were known by nearly everybody. Honesty, humility and a willingness to help others defined "a good man," the highest compliment. Only a few went on to college, and most stayed in the area all of their lives.

This is still a way of life in Oklahoma, and can produce some of the finest people you'll ever know.

During the late 1940's, Dad stumbled on an art "contest" on the back of a matchbook, advertised by the Art Instruction Schools. He sent in his submission and was accepted.

My Grandmother, a schoolteacher in a one-room school house, somehow scraped together around $300 to enroll him in the course, and he dedicated all of his free time to mastering the techniques sent to him.

A few years later, Dad went to the University of Oklahoma for a degree in art, because, in his words, he had "bailed enough hay." He graduated in 1957, entering the wide and fast world of advertising and suits and society. He moved to Virginia, briefly, to work in advertising, but homesickness got the better of him.

In Oklahoma, Dad was a powerhouse, creating one the state's leading advertising agency at the time, Poole-Hobbes, Inc. He also created the Oklahoma Art Directors' Guild, and some of the finest artists in the nation came to his home. Dad hosted workshops with Fritz Scholder, and we have personal work given to him by Mark English and Bernie Fuchs. More importantly, Dad began to see artists living their lives through their art, and the allure was too great for him to ignore.

When I was around 4 years old, Dad got rid of the suit and crewcut, grew a beard, and bought OJ, his beloved orange Volkswagen camper. He began to study with R.V. "Dick" Goetz, a great painter, instructor and one of Dad's lifelong friends, and he began to live the life of an artist.

This departure was so far from his origins - where his closest friends were still on the farm, struggling with the demands of the land, Dad had an orange VW camper, a turquoise ring and flip flops. He painted naked ladies, went to crazy parties and argued incessantly about reforming politics and religion.

Dad struggled constantly with the man he had been raised to be and the man he was becoming. I think that struggle is what made him truly unique, but it also haunted him. He couldn't embrace the "uppity" world of fine art, and yet he couldn't be satisfied with small town life. So he painted, and painted...and painted.

The O. Gail Poole Collection is Dad's diary of his most intimate thoughts, joys and struggles. I hope to be able to find a place to host a retrospective, as it's extremely powerful to view the images that fueled one man's life. Dad's work goes beyond the personal to represent, in a way, the masks with which we all struggle.

Dad was in the final stages of his cancer on Saturday, April 13. Thanks to his friends, a Comanche elder came that morning to lead the most moving ceremony I have ever witnessed.

The day before, recognizing the signs, I called people from far and wide to come squeeze his hand, and they came. FedEx packages and letters had come pouring in from artists and admirers from the world over, and visits from some of the best people I'll ever know drowned the house in scotch and laughter. I read all of the letters and e-mails to Dad as I held his hand, and I played one of his personally curated CDs on my laptop next to his bed. (Damndest mix of Abba, Renee Fleming, Jesus Christ Superstar!, the Kings Singers, Dave Brubeck, Waylon & Willie, John Lennon and Charlie Poole, but I swear to you he recognized and responded to each one.)

On that day, each chapter of Dad's life was represented by at least one person, if not several, all knowing a side of him that only they could know. I wonder what it must have been like for him, for all of his masks to collide and mingle in such a real way.

Finally, on Saturday afternoon, "The Bradley Boys," the guys he had gone through grade school with, all came to visit Dad. They told stories and EJ, his high school hero and subject of many paintings and sketches, played guitar and sang to him.

At exactly the hour of evening when the sun painted its own masterpiece of uncapturable light, Dad became, as Campbell so eloquently put it, "a released individual," and all of the masks slid away.

Cataloguing the O. Gail Poole Collection, Part 1

July 31, 2013 Nicole Poole

Being the daughter of a prolific and wildly talented painter has been, and continues to be, an honor. Dad left hundreds of works in oil, encaustic, pastel, watercolor and pen & ink (not counting the dozens of sketchbooks), and it is my job to figure out what to do with them. As I've said before, each of those paintings represents his voice and soul and I've been protective of them all of my life.

Dad was an artist and had his own sense of organization, which honestly I'm still trying to figure out. In addition to one of the bedrooms in his house being stuffed floor to ceiling with paintings, they adorned every square inch of wall space AND a giant outbuilding in the backyard.

In his final days, I tapped every connection I had to contact Ghislain d'Humieres, the former Director of the Fred Jones Museum of Art. I asked Ghislain and Assistant Director Gail Kana Anderson to come meet Dad and to see all of the work in situ. It's rare to be able to do this, as so often when we see works of an artist, he or she is already in happy mountain, and the collection is already tagged and organized. Seeing how an artist actually lived is a pretty cool thing.

Ghislain d'Humieres, former director of the Fred Jones Museum, with Julie, looking at the paintings in the shed.

Ghislain, Gail & Dad. Recognition for a life in the arts, long overdue.

When Dad died, I had my hands and heart full of The Things You Do When Someone Dies. Though I knew it had to be dealt with, I couldn't fathom how to tackle the collection on top of everything else. Luckily, Dad had a lot of truly extraordinary friends, and I had my Amazing Michael and Dear Alissa. Here's what happened.

Julie D., one of Dad's friends, also happens to be a professional registrar. She and Michael worked together to determine storage solutions and what archival materials were needed to preserve the piece. Julie then went to work developing a complex system to document the works, while her husband, Farrel, who happens to be a database engineer (and a fabulous musician), went to work designing a database to store and organize the information.

Michael researched climate-controlled storage spaces large enough for the collection, then rented one (I thank the Universe nearly every day that we passed over the one in Moore.) He bought and installed shelving that would house everything. Dear Alissa, an old friend I love fiercely, put out the call to a bunch of her students at OU, who came for several days to organize and prepare the paintings for transport. Michael then rented a giant truck which, alongside Dad's F150, was filled with paintings. and Michael, the students and I hauled every piece to storage.

I bought more pieces of cardboard than I ever thought possible, and began work on unwrapping the paintings and arranging them with cardboard in between so that they wouldn't be damaged banging up against each other.

Julie organized a team of Dad's traveling buddies, two of which are professional photographers, all the salt of the earth. Mark, Becky, Cathy, Susan, Keith and Julie worked their asses off in the heat each day for several weeks to sort, photograph, measure, describe and document first few hundred paintings on canvas and board. (Oils on paper and pen & ink coming in the Fall/Winter.)

The gang at work. If you look closely, you can see their wings.

Each painting has a paper record noting its location in storage, size, description, materials, condition, title if known, provenance if known (they'd holler at me while I worked to ask about stuff).

Each painting is assigned a unit number.

From here, I'm not sure what will happen, other than continuing work on the cataloguing and on fattening the database with historical sales and other records.

My goal is to curate several small collections of like pieces for traveling exhibits to Europe and the Southwest, the Big Goal being to find a very lucky museum to host a retrospective. I'm not in a hurry to sell off the collection - but each of these works needs an audience, whether they be buyers or the general public.

As we move forward, I hope each of you will find something you like about this blog or Dad's work to pass on to your friends and contacts. The more we can get his name and his life's work out into the world, the more settled my soul will become.

In the meantime, through the grief, I realize how extremely fortunate I am to be surrounded by such great friends. Dad was fond of saying "to have a friend, you have to be a friend..." I hope some day to be able to come close to giving back what I've received.

More soon. Actually leaving the house to wander around The Latin Quarter.

Nicole

Poole and Van Gogh Part 1

July 29, 2013 Nicole Poole

This morning I awoke from a vivid dream about one of Dad's paintings, "Cypress and Night Sky," which hung in my bedroom at his place for years. It's an enormous southwestern landscape (53x53) inspired by Dad's hero, Van Gogh. It hung near my bed and I could spend hours looking at how many vivid colors he managed to get into each brush stroke.

It always touched me that, while the rest of the rooms in Dad's little bungalow constituted a rabbit's warren of art supplies, boxes of slides, photos and genealogy information, new and old electronics, camping gear and bottles of wine to take with him to his friends' parties, my room remained pristine. He kept it off limits for his clutter and it was always the same, which was a comfort each time I went home.

On to Van Gogh. Dad did about as much research on dear Vincent as he did on his own family, which was considerable. He saw his works first hand whenever he could, poured over his letters to Theo and had dozens of books. He never thought Vincent was insane - Dad believed that he and Van Gogh shared the same passion and obsession of finding expression on canvas, and that like himself, Van Gogh was simply misunderstood because of his lack of ability to express his true self any other way.

In the year 2001, I was touring with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and had a 3-week hiatus between shows. Mom and Dad came to London and we traveled together to France. I was able to take them to Arles, the town in France where Van Gogh did most of his work.

I watched my father standing on bridges and in fields with his hands held in front of him like a frame, weeping uncontrollably. He saw first hand what Van Gogh saw and he wept at the enormity and personal understanding of what Vincent must have gone through trying to express such beauty.

Dad began searching for his own voice through Vincent's style around 1997; the works he created during that period, southwestern landscapes, self-portraits and other sundries, represented one of his most passionate phases. The self-portrait he did in the style of Van Gogh is what I chose to display on his field box when we scattered his ashes under the Blackjack Oak tree in the Bradley, OK cemetery.

The note on the back of "Cypress and Night Sky" states:

"The influence of Van Gogh on this painting is very evident. He is a constant influence on my work. Even my license plate is "Van Gogh." He is a hero of mine. He had enough faith in what he was doing to continue, even though the general public scorned and laughed at his painting. Though he was offered rides, he chose to walk through the countryside, saying that he couldn't closely observe Nature while riding."

Today I will walk slowly through Paris and make a frame with my hands to see the world in a different way. All artists, no matter how they are perceived, can teach us lessons about our brief life. This morning, after my dream, I thank my Dad and Van Gogh for this one.

On Being Raised by a Painter

July 24, 2013 Nicole Poole

Dad gave up his remarkably successful advertising business, Poole Hobbes, Inc. and began painting full-time when I was around four. He had been studying with his mentor and dear friend, R.V. Goetz and trying to live the advice given in the great book, The Art Spirit, by Robert Henri. So he bought an orange VW camper and named it "OJ" (later VanGogh) and rode the wheels off of that thing, mainly visiting the West, especially New Mexico, which enchanted him as it did so many other artists. (Nicolai Fechin being prime among Dad's heroes, look him up. Bastard was phenomenal.) This is where my love of travel was fomented. Dad had Nutter Butter cookies in the cabinet (Ding Dongs didn't travel well), and a big sheepskin that he laid across the bunk so I could sleep as he drove. Because I was young and chatty, he put honey on my fingers and gave me a feather, which occupied me for miles. I collected tiny rocks in Mexico and played along the rim of the Rio Grande while Dad painted. I helped him stir rabbit skin glue and sometimes he would let me paint gesso on his canvases. But mostly I entertained myself with the landscape. This is also the time I learned how to cuss, as painting outdoors can be a treacherous activity.

I would often accompany Dad to art openings, pretending like I was a very young, art-loving stranger so I could sidle up to people as they looked at his work and listen to their comments. I loved to hear people trying to ascribe meaning to his work, because in my mind they had no idea what they were talking about. I knew the meaning behind those paintings, and Dad knew, but nobody else could ever get it.

Dad was a great and prolific painter. Each of his paintings and brush strokes are like hearing his voice, and represent different times of my life. Kind of like you remember where you were when big life events happen, I know where I was when he created each piece of work.

Now it's my task to deal with the body of work he left behind, about 1200 pieces in oil, pastel, pen & ink and watercolor. Though an amazing team of people have organized them and they're close to being fully inventoried and photographed, they're sitting in cold storage in the dark. I can't help but feel that decades of my life are in the dark with them. But more on that later.

It's early morning in Paris as I write this and today I need to force myself to get out and get some sunshine.

Thanks for reading.

Nicole

Remembering O. Gail Poole, My Dad