Bob Chase

Hello my favorite small people!

 

I hope you're having fun in NY this week – from the pictures your mom posted on facebook, it looks like you're having a wonderful time getting to hang out with your cousins, and that's awesome.  Are you older or younger than them?  In my family, your dad and I were the oldest cousins on GrampEs side, but pretty close to the youngest cousins on GramEs side.  But we had fun every time we got to get together with some of them!

 

Today's artist is Bob Chase.  He's a pretty current artist; he started as a WWII photographer, but had a very long career – he lived to be 95 and was a painter, sculptor and other kinds of artist for pretty much all his life!

 

Bob was super cool because he went to the Ringling school (yep! Like the Circus!), and while he was there he met a very nice lady who donated the property that he created his studio and art school on…and the lady (who was pretty rich) also had a botanical garden named after her, and for years and years after she died, he went to the garden every Sunday and volunteered to work there, as his way of paying her back. 

 

Another thing that Bob is famous for was his 8-track collection.  You can see some of it in the background of this picture.  8 tracks were how music was played before cassette tapes, which were before CDs, which were before you could download music digitally.  An 8 track usually had 8 songs (or tracks!) on it, and if you had a machine that played them, you could put one in and it would just loop the songs – repeat them over and over again for as long as the machine was on – this was good for an artist even once there were other ways to play music, since once he got his hands all dirty he didn't want to have to stop & change CDs or hit buttons on a machine. 

 

His work is bright and beautiful and abstract and he sounds like he was just a really cool guy, so I like Bob a lot.

 

Hope all is well with you – know that I love you and think that you're awesome.

XOXOXO

Auntie Paula