The Life and Times of John Hogan 1937-2026

A great Santa Fe artist. A dear friend of Joe's family. His life in a "nutshell".

Transcript

SPEAKER_08 0:07

Which will be a rail vehicle. Much in the same manner with those small power to get pieces of equipment that the rail can be used to repair a road. This will be a very small craft, it will have a cockpit, it will have a radio on it, and it is a heart that I will ride rails with my broadcasting equipment.

SPEAKER_00 0:28

John Hogan is a friend of my father's and a friend of our mine and a friend of our family's uh man I knew all my growing up who was an artist, and my father did a portrait of him and recorded him. Uh, and we recently put those elements together for a little memorial talking portrait kind of thing. And um, so I edited down about five four cassettes of his life story that my father recorded in 2000 into just this little thing. A little longer than most of these intergalactic computing machine episodes. But uh for those uh who care, here's the life and tears of Mr. John.

SPEAKER_01 2:01

And my parents were either in their early forties or very late thirties when I was born. I think my mother was actually forty years old. Uh dad worked in the oil field, he was a driller, and we uh, before I came onto the scene, they used to travel around and uh go from job to job wherever they happened to be. But I was a late child. My mother always loved kids and always wanted kids, and I didn't find out till we were at my dad's funeral in uh 1951, I guess it was, that I actually had an older sister. He would have probably been 20 years older than me if she'd lived. And nobody in my family ever spoke of her. Does this sound familiar to you? It's kind of those uh, we don't want to talk about that, so nobody talks about it. You know, I was 15 years old, and here I find out I had a big sister that I never knew or heard of. And it explained a lot of stuff to me about how my mother was when I was growing up. Um she was probably the most protective mother on the planet, and uh, I guess for good reason. She'd lost one child and didn't think she was ever going to be able to have another one. Uh, she raised every kid she could get her hands on, uh, anybody that would give them to her to babysit or anything else. She took care of her three brothers and raised them, and probably my dad too, about that time, because they all lived uh, you know, a couple of fields away out in the Louisiana swamps. You know, and before the war there wasn't any electricity or uh gas stoves or uh telephones or any of that stuff in that part of the country, hardly any roads. The nearest road was like two and a half, three miles from the house that had gravel on. And it was about ten miles down that to the first paved road, and then from where the gravel road passed, it was a dirt road down to where my grandma lived. And on days like today when it'd been raining like it has here, you couldn't get in there even walking. Yeah, all I remember about her now was she was really pretty and young, which means I don't know, anywhere between twenty and forty would have been young, or she must have been younger than my mother because she didn't have gray hair or anything like that. And uh when we finished the first first grade, it was like uh getting ready to go out into the big world of the second grade and was a whole nother adventure. But I remember our last day of class, I went up and uh very nervously and self-consciously went to the front of the classroom uh to kiss her goodbye because that's the way we did things at my house. You kiss people goodnight and goodbye if you cared about them. And my dad and mom always kiss and kiss me, and there wasn't any of this stuff about not kissing your relatives because they were men. Well, when I went up and kissed Ms. MacWorder on the cheek, everybody in the class thought that was extremely funny. And I went back and sat down in my seat in the back of the room, blushing like crazy, and uh determined not to ever kiss another teacher, at least not until much later in my life when they were uh old enough to kiss me back. We didn't really have band, but when you learn to play a musical instrument in fourth, fifth, and sixth grade, and when you got to seventh grade, you got to be in the junior high band and play your instrument along with people that played other instruments, and this was like junior high band. And by the time you got to the eighth and ninth grade, you could be in the marching band or the uh concert band, which meant you got to play in March. And the marching band went to all of the uh to the games, so you got to go on road trips. And this meant you got to ride on a bus with a bunch of majorettes and the girls in the high school band, and uh uh if you were really uh risque, you could uh sneak and smoke some cigarettes while you're on this band trip. So everybody used to take a pack of Lucky Strikes or a pack of uh camels or Paul Malls, which was a three biggies in those days. I don't remember who the big deal was that smoked Lucky Strikes, but when we started getting into the early 50s, it was uh real cool to wear a t-shirt with your Lucky Strikes rolled up in the sleeve and wear a vest. And blue jeans and blue suede shoes with white socks and a little skinny uh oh belt that was like a blue suede belt or a black belt of some kind. And wear boots like the motorcycle guy kids did or these blue suede tassel loafers like uh the kids in the band did. That was more or less the band kids uniform off stage. We used to go and get magazines. My dad loved to read um Dime Westerns. So we'd go down to the Buckhorn and uh which was a bar and a newsstand, and he'd be in there drinking a beer or a shot of whiskey or something and looking for his crews, which is where they were at in between jobs, and I'd get to hang around and pick out some comic books and some uh science fiction magazines, and then we'd get those and go back home. But after he got to where he couldn't do this anymore, I was kind of rereading a lot of the same books over and over again, and uh we were kind of counting our pennies because we didn't know where money was gonna come from in the near future, and uh uh my life memory of my dad was being in the room before he died, and then uh my mother stayed with him and I went out because they didn't want me to be in the waiting room while he was breathing his last breath. But uh I sat out in the waiting room until after he died. Then when we got ready to go, I remember that I had left uh one of my books or something in the room where he did uh had died, and I went back in to get that, and he was laying in the bed uh with his mouth open and uh uh totally lifeless and kind of nothing like the the way people looked when they were fixed up for being in a casket in the funeral home. So this was probably the first time I ever saw a real dead person that wasn't cosmetic to be ready for a funeral. Our soul support and uh and uh sustenance came through him. Mother had never had a job or worked outside of the home. She'd stayed home and taken care of me all of her all of my life. Uh I became a rebellious child in uh those years, and not wanting to hurt my mother, was uh always kind of in some sort of trouble with her because uh I didn't want to stay home and spend time with her. I wanted to go out and spend time with my friends and uh do things which were generally uh inclined to get me in a lot of trouble. And the high school years were tough in that respect. Uh we became less and less communicative. Uh well communication became totally one way. I got to where there wasn't anything that I could say to her for a long time that wasn't uh going to be hurtful to her, so I just stopped saying anything. So in the fifties and sixties they had a pretty good uh program for getting people college educations if they at all wanted them. All you had to do was uh apply to get it. You know, my average was between C and B, I think, and all state schools were uh fairly easy to get into. But by my sophomore year, there were a couple of people that turned up down there. One of them was a guy named Ed Schutz, who was a graduate of New Mexico Highlands art department out in Las Vegas, New Mexico. And he and a lady named Alice Heard started the art department at Northeast as uh part of the fine arts uh program there. They had an excellent music department already, which most of my friends were in, uh, and the art department consisted at that point of two instructors and three students. So we had probably the best teacher-student ratio on the planet ever, uh, short of just going in as an apprentice and uh studying with somebody. Uh at that point I decided to switch my major and go into art, and it meant that I wouldn't have to uh figure out how to go over to Ruston and uh go to school and find a place to live in another town and uh kind of uproot myself from uh all of my friends in Monroe. So my first year I was taking um basic courses with Alice Heard and uh uh I think I may have had my first painting class with her, and for the first time in my life, got oil paints and a brush and began putting paint on the canvas. My uh my teacher or else Ed Schutz called me in to let me know that there was an opening in uh one of the companies there in town for a part-time artist to work in their commercial art uh department. And this was at F. Strauss and Sons, which was a wholesale uh grocery chain that distributed stuff all over Louisiana and parts of Mississippi and Arkansas. And their department put out a little uh that they one of the things they did was they made up handbills for all of the door of the stores that were uh part of their uh co-op there at uh F. Strauss and Sun. And Billy Hargis was my boss, and I worked for him for the rest of the years that I was uh undergraduate, and uh ended up eventually working full-time, going to school part-time, and uh more or less running that department while he was off uh being uh president of the state JCs. Friends of mine that were musicians and uh the bands that I were hanging around with in that time. Most of my buddies and my roommates at that point had a had got to the point in their musical career where they could go out and um put together a little group and play gigs. And I was probably one of the first groupies on the planet because I went with them on all of their jobs and helped them set up uh the band and kind of uh break down afterwards and uh was a kind of a troubleshooter for the band, and also it was my job to sit in the back and uh mix drinks while everybody was on stage so that we didn't run out of some uh libations to keep the uh creative juices flowing while they were working. And occasionally somebody like Slick Lawson would get so loose that uh perhaps he would take a step too close to the edge and fall off the bandstand. I'd have to uh come into the rescue and at least stand up there and hold his bass fiddle while he stumbled around and got back up on the stage. The last year or so that I was in school there, uh I was rooming with uh a lot of my friends that were musicians at that point. We had a almost a fraternity house. I was kind of the token artist in there, and everybody else was uh music majors, but uh, there were 13 of us in this one kind of 12-room uh house just off of the campus. And if you ever saw the movie Animal House, it'll give you an idea of what living there was like in those days. Um we had some really great parties that were uh legendary, probably even down to this time. And my room was located right behind the uh uh piano, which was in the living room, which meant that it was pointless to try to go to bed till all of the jam sessions were over, and sometimes I was two or three or four. in the morning. So my uh lifestyle in those days was to get a couple hours of sleep after the jam session, get up, go to work at F. Strauss and Sun in the morning, catch a couple of glasses in the afternoon, which I usually fell asleep in, if there were anything like art history where they uh turned the lights off. Go back to work at F. Strauss until I finished uh whatever things were to be done there that day, and then go and meet all my friends at uh either Sophie Williams bar downtown, which had the uh we had the biggest collection of progressive jazz on uh 33 and a third high fidelity stereo disc in the town. And we would sit and uh listen to music until he closed and then we would go back to the to the frat house or to uh somebody else's apartment and uh stay there until it got late enough to go to bed. Always had a real hard time making decisions about change. So uh with the help of a few of my friends and uh way too much alcohol in my blood system one night I managed to fall asleep trying to drive home and demolish my Volkswagen along with two or three parked cars along the side of the road. So I got on a bus uh a couple of days later and uh rode to El Paso and why I picked El Paso was just like flipping a coin almost I uh knew it was on the border by Mexico and my first intention was that I'd go there for a while and look around and see if there was anything that I could do to make a living at and maybe then head on out to California where it seemed like everything that was going on in the world at this time was in California. What I didn't know that El Paso is one of those phenomena like they have an outer space between galaxies called a black hole. Once you're there it's extremely difficult to get your molecules rearranged in a manner that's ever going to get you out of there in the old in the old fan name right through the money when I got there I hung around for a while and started job hunting immediately I had a fairly good portfolio together of commercial artwork that I'd done during the years and some of my fine art pieces and got a room with a shower and a hot plate with a close to downtown and then about a week or so I met a guy at uh Sun Publishing Company which was a like a publishing house that put out like a weekly shopping news and printed several other little weekly papers and they were in need of some layout and pay stop artists to help with this. He hired me to work there part-time like with a maximum workload of maybe 20 hours a week which is what their budget would afford and it seemed like after I got this job I put in my 20 hours the first two days that I was there and from then on my part-time status was uh strictly a thing of paperwork you know I put in as many hours every week as there was for things to do there's a whole nother story Wayne and Jerry and I came like to Los Tres Caballeros we were in Juarez on a regular basis most every night uh one night when we're in the Don Felix uh visiting with our friend uh Jesus Gonzalez who was the owner and uh kind of an old-time uh Juarez bar guy he uh he ran uh Don Felix as a family bar everybody came in there and drank and uh told stories and visited and uh part of the thing uh the attraction was Chewy and uh the people that had come there through the years because they knew him and met him and uh he was like a uh a safe port in a storm in Mexico. He was the only guy I knew that would uh cash a check on an American bank for uh for a gringo and uh if it wasn't for an exorbitant amount uh he would just hold it until you came back the next time and paid it off because uh there wasn't any uh of that kind of uh trust between clientele and uh and uh the people that were in business over there it was very much a media thing give me your dollars and go away well we became lifelong friends with Chewy too and uh he's still living and uh has his own little place out on the edge of town there I'm more as well one night when we were sitting with Don Felix there were a couple of girls at the end of the bar that were kind of interesting they spoke both Spanish and English uh fluently although with some a kind of a strange slang because they were from the South El Paso uh part of uh El Paso and they were sisters one of them was Julie Reynolds who later well Julie I don't know can't remember her name at that time but she later became Julie Reynolds and uh her and Jerry uh became married Julie introduced uh Wayne to his wife Lourdes and me to the lady that was later to become my wife Martha and so our connections were early on to uh uh Warez uh the Don Felix uh Juy Gonzalez and the the Warez crowd that kind of hung out there another guy named George Chase who worked with me at Sun Publishing Company became part of this uh group and uh we gradually uh developed into some lifelong friendships de lado projects Jerry West was down in uh Almogordo at that time with Charlie Southern building La Trostaria which uh was their first building project was that 1970 along in there 7203 somewhere along in there yeah I think it was 71 because I graduated Highlands in 69 with uh Charlie Southern and that bunch and then uh worked for the museum in El Paso for about a year and that's kind of when I started up with uh 1208 Texas because I was out of graduate school and not going back to Highlands every summer and uh really kind of needed a place to work and do my own printmaking. Well about the time that the uh hippies started showing up on the scene it was when we were uh still hanging out in the the bars in Mexico and uh by this time I'd uh Martha and I had married she had two daughters by a previous marriage that were like three and two and three years old or three and four years old and we had a son which was uh John and I began uh looking to get out of working as a commercial artist I'd left Sun Publishing Company and gone over to uh uh an art uh ad agency called Dave Sanders and I worked for him about a year and then an opportunity came up for me to teach in the public schools which would give me my summers free mexicano por más que la gente me juzgue te llamo yo les aseguro que soy mexicano de acá desde lado Jerry did several uh editions there that were like mixed media pieces he was doing silk screen work and etching and we were combining all kinds of projects uh he was working during the week up in uh trosteria and uh living at Leloose with Charlie and uh uh I got several other guys who I got to know pretty well. Uh Kirk Heeley was one of them who's a local painter now. But uh and then we'd spend uh our weekends uh working on his projects and mine and taking uh uh safaris into Juarez and the nightlife over in Mexico and uh having kind of a real bohemian existence for quite a while.

SPEAKER_04 35:07

El Paso was an interesting place in those days uh because um it seemed like people got there and never left and usually they had an interesting story about uh why they were there um sometimes they were on their way somewhere else and got sidetracked into El Paso other times they were there hiding out from the law or running from X-Y's or just generally on the lamb and uh being comfortable having one foot in Mexico and the other one in the US de los que a la guerra llevamos nuestra hembra de los que morimos amando y cantando yo soy de ese bando I begin to see images in the Southwest that were uh related to uh the kinds of things that were being done by the Impressionist painters and by the uh the Plenaire painters of uh the uh Barbazon school in France in those years and uh uh I became very excited about working outdoors with nature and for the next few years while I was in graduate school I created a possible way of working for myself that included an old 1949 international pickup which I constructed like a camper shell on the back out of two by fours and construction plywood that I rifled from highway construction jobs around New Mexico and used this as kind of a rolling studio so I could take it out to a site and uh open up and work with a fairly large canvas that was up to around three or four feet to uh to nearly five feet in uh dimensions.

SPEAKER_01 37:37

And my work became more monumental and more uh involved with larger and larger landscape uh paintings uh the countryside around highlands and up into the mountains around uh uh uh Taos and Truchus and Trompus and uh and to uh tourist sites now that were in those days almost inaccessible unless you had a four-wheel drive vehicle or unless the uh the roads which ran up and down stream bridge weren't flooded at that time became good friends at this point and began doing a lot of uh work together and printmaking at Highlands and then also painting and drawing from uh a lot of the local uh neighbor uh bars in uh old town Las Vegas which uh were like um in some of the areas of the countryside around there we were meeting people that were like really the uh old time Hispanic uh individuals from uh a culture that had just practically disappeared from uh the face of the earth. It was maybe the last time the last place in the world where uh the uh the old penitentiary culture still was uh in existence and still be in practice and the old uh patron system was still uh in effect uh the land was still in the hands of a very few individuals and uh few old families that uh kept up uh farming in these uh regions in a style and a method that was pretty much the same way it had been for uh 500 years throughout uh the colonies and the Spanish colonies in northern New Mexico and Colorado and on down into Mexico. Industrial revolution never reached this part of the world. You know the railroads came through and kept going and Las Vegas was an interesting town in this respect because half of it was uh an a railroad community from the turn of the century where uh and it it was one of the biggest rail yards in uh New Mexico uh the other half was uh centered around an old town plaza that had three and four hundred year old adobe structures still in existence and uh an old Hispanic Hispanic uh culture that still spoke a dialect that people from the outside uh couldn't really understand even if they spoke Spanish you know it was kind of an amazing era area and I think the the the group of us that were up there pretty much continuously for the next four or five years were at a point that was kind of an end of an era for a lot of things. New Mexico Highlands had been kind of a Mecca for artists up to this point and a lot of us showed up there with uh a lot of new ideas that were coming in from the uh the culture of uh the beat generation the uh the big cities the uh the beginnings of the the uh hippie movement in the 1960s were starting to trickle down into this area of the world so there were people from all over showing up in um this kind of outpost of um northern New Mexico uh where stuff like uh coyote and uh marijuana were still part of their culture and had been for centuries. The Indian cultures kind of uh blended together with all of this and uh we were uh at a point in history in a time where uh practically anything we wanted to experiment with was uh possible and this came through in a lot of our artwork and in a lot of our lifestyles and uh the communal cultures were uh all around us uh the rock culture was coming into uh play the Beatles were having their influence uh the Grateful Dead Roslo Allen had one of the first Grateful Dead albums I ever heard and it was just amazing to hear what they were doing with music uh out in San Francisco at this point. He'd been out there for a few years and then come to uh Highlands to study uh with schoolie but ended up over Over there doing uh sculpture with Harry Lippy and doing some very uh innovative things. Uh later it went on to be a leading jeweler in this part of the country. We were just uh kind of amazed at our own uh facility to to create and bring new ideas into the world at this point. Jerry and I began doing some uh uh work on a print shop that he and I were doing as a combined effort out here on a piece of property of his, and every summer we'd uh do that. I would come up and one year we uh I had a tent that I was using uh for uh a living site that summer uh and we began construction on uh what was later to become a print shop and a living quarter that uh we both used. And then he and Marydale later turned into their living quarters and uh uh home. That was like uh the first year I know we had uh a piece of uh construction plastic over one corner of the uh building that had a uh uh kitchen area and a sink and a and a shower and toilet. And uh I think it was a couple of years before we actually got a roof on that, but we were living around and uh around that and working around that every summer and building houses that were getting more and more complicated and more interesting, and uh working with some uh very liberal people like John Eric from over in uh Albuquerque, who was a state senator, we did three buildings for him over three or four summers. I really enjoyed the uh the camaraderie that came out of that and the uh the physical involvement in building was uh a thing that took me right back to my childhood days, uh building roads and uh uh digging in that hole outside my my mother's window on uh Louisville Avenue. And solving problems in three-dimensional forms and uh uh construction that were very uh very real. And there was a lot of uh, you know, like figuring out things like how to make a stain that would uh create a color combination we wanted inside a building or uh what sort of trim to do at the wood shop, and uh you know we would all work on uh carving projects together. Um this went on for quite a few years. I don't remember exactly when we started. Eventually it got to the point where I uh left El Paso and moved up to uh Santa Fe full time. And by then I had a studio space that uh I had built on the back of some of Jerry's property that was like a roundhouse with uh windows facing onto uh an eastern exposure that opened onto an arroyo, and this became my studio space, and uh I lived and worked in it for quite a while.

SPEAKER_03 49:19

I tied my horse at the cantina just as the sun's going down. I took me a shot of tequila, and I took me a little stroll around town by the bridge crossing over the Royal. I heard a guitar softly play, an old Spanish tune by the light of the moon, singing come back to wood sand when the spirit can rise like the clouds in the skies, the eagle still flies where he may through the bright air and the going things.

SPEAKER_01 50:05

And it goes beyond just uh the influence of one visual artist on another one anymore because uh there are so many connections with other things that are happening, uh music, uh the directions that uh physics and science are going, mathematics uh pollux and uh paths down which uh it seems to be very familiar to me to think in terms of uh some of the things that uh uh experimental physicists are trying to do with uh uh space and time right now. Using one as a ground and the other as uh uh a medium. This is just, you know, the artist treats uh canvas and color as a metaphor the same way they're looking at uh a lot of aspects of reality. Uh the idea of what we perceive as real being a consensus of opinion as much as uh an actual uh series of events is gaining more and more credence every year. Looking at different societies in the world uh makes this really obvious because uh what uh a goat herder in uh the north of Greece conceives of as reality is much different from what uh uh a rock and roll musician in uh San Francisco may think of as reality. Although the common ground uh becomes very uh shaky in some cases, it becomes very uh strong in others. So, in a lot of ways, we're constantly redefining the the reality of the worlds we live in. Uh I think art is very important in this process and creativity in any form, whether it's in the uh the areas of uh traditional areas, art, music, dance, uh writing, uh words, poetry, uh physics has become almost a philosophy instead of a uh a hard science and a lot of the things that I get from reading uh the uh authors who are writing about parallel universes and the uh way we move from one uh to the other by observation to me seems to fit perfectly well with what goes on in the creative process when you're uh formulating a work of art. How far are we from being done here, Jerry? Is it you you make a closing statement? Two-minute closing statement. Two-minute closing statement. Okay, uh, I want to thank all of the little people who uh have surrounded me from my conception and that Irish uh glint in my father's eye, which uh uh you know the spirit world is uh forever with me. My leprechauns uh have protected me from harm in ways that I can only begin to perceive. The fact that I'm here at this point in time, in this age in the universe, and not uh, you know, just dust particles floating in space, which uh have come so close to being the case on many, many occasions, I can only uh look at in uh in awe that I have survived and am here now.

SPEAKER_00 58:40

Dear friend of the family. See you guys on the next episode.