Norwich
On a nearby flatbed scanner he has placed a petri dish, together with a trout fly, fragments from a ski pole and the curled-up band of an aluminum foil cutter.
Objects such as these, digitized and manipulated through software, take a journey from the everyday to the realm of the imagination. In a piece titled Plat du Jour, for example, the petals of a clematis flower are multiplied and arranged to resemble a monstrous, many-legged crustacean.
“He’s taking things that exist in reality,” his wife, Jane Sherwin, said, “but he’s taking the forces and colors and ideas and reconfiguring them.”
In one instance, the couple’s cat, Oliver, fell asleep on the scanner, which led to a series of images showing paws floating in an abstract geometry of netting and fur.
“He incorporates whatever’s there,” Sherwin said.
Anything has potential, she said, whether Hasse looks outdoors, at the hardware store — or in his wife’s pantry.
“The aluminum foil in my kitchen,” she said, “is under serious attack.”
One recent day in his home studio, after more than an hour of work, Hasse’s eyes began to droop. He took his hand off the mouse and placed it on his right eyelid, holding it open. For more than two decades, he has lived with Parkinson’s disease, which over the years has largely claimed his ability to write and speak. Often, Sherwin speaks for him, leaning toward him to listen and translate.
Hasse is showing a collection of his work until June at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, on the fourth floor of the Williamson Translational Research Building. The art is on the walls now, and the formal opening is scheduled for Thursday.
Though in recent years the ailment has weakened his eyes and sometimes his legs as well — he occasionally uses a wheelchair — he is as productive as ever.
And he is still learning. One of Hasse’s favorite prints, which is on display at the hospital, is called Mist Rising Off A Taoist Lake in Kaolin Glaze — from the Wu Wei Caprichos.
“I finally figured out how to make fog,” he said recently, looking up at the picture’s titular swirls.
How did he do it?
The words came slowly, as Sherwin listened and guessed: Charge? Chart? With an effort, Hasse said, clearly and sharply, “I charred with a match.”
An English major, Hasse graduated from Dartmouth College in 1980 and began his artistic career as a poet. But the double entendres, the nuances and layers of meaning in the words, “were too tortured,” Sherwin said, and for Hasse “it was maddening.”
So inspired by Eastern philosophy and Carl Jung, theorist of the collective unconscious, Hasse moved on to visual art. He created sumi ink drawings by moving the paper, not the brush, a style evoking those influences.
In March 1994, at 35, something else came along to shape his work: a diagnosis of the early onset of the neurological disease.
“Ten years on, he had lost his ability to feed, bathe or dress himself,” said a family biography titled Portrait of the Artist as a Young Parkinsonian, “and his hands shook so badly that he could no longer hold a book open to read. He was totally dependent on his wife, Jane, and figured that he was in the end stages of the disease.”
“Not so!” the biography adds. In 2005, deep brain stimulation restored much of his body function. As recently as two years ago he still could ride a bicycle, according to Sherwin.
A few months ago, Hasse began a probiotic regimen that he hopes will restore his health, and is raising money for a more intensive treatment available only abroad.
“Even now, the wheelchair is very new,” Sherwin said. “He’s not a person who quits.”
Hasse’s handwriting has deteriorated to the point where he signs his pieces with a symbol from the I Ching, a six-line square signifying modesty.
He recently found the strength for a handwritten letter, which sits by his desk at home. Tiny block letters cover a single page — a symptom of Parkinson’s called micrographia.
The message was to Dorothy Byrne, of the charitable Byrne Foundation, asking her to sponsor his show.
When she agreed, Sherwin said, “that was huge.”
Even though Hasse’s work has appeared at Dartmouth-Hitchcock before, this exhibition came about by chance. When the hospital’s art coordinator, Marianne Barthel, arrived 2½ years ago, she found two of his images in storage.
“Rick’s name was not on them at all,” she said by the phone this week. “There was nothing indicating what they were … and I thought, those are nice pieces; I know where to put them.”
A few months later, Hasse contacted Barthel looking for the same two prints, and learned that they had found their way onto the hospital walls — followed, in this exhibition, by some of his more recent creations.
“It’s really lovely to know that, despite how his body has changed in the last 20 years, he’s been able to evolve and grow creatively to continue his art,” Barthel said. “And I’m thrilled that we can host a show and get his work out there again.”
The pieces at Dartmouth-Hitchcock are like most of Hasse’s work, in that their original materials resist identification. But at the hospital, one or two elements are familiar.
On a recent day, as a gaggle of white-coated men passed by, glancing at the installation, one of them exclaimed, “A petri dish!”
“Correct!” Sherwin said.
“This is the artist,” she said, introducing the man to Rick.
The doctors wanted to know what was in the petri dish — a mushroom fungus spore, she told them, translating.
And in this picture next to it?
A shower curtain ring.
“Oh,” one of them said, after a moment. “I see that. …Yes, I see that now.”
Recognitions like these are common to his work, where through his digital manipulations the ordinary becomes otherworldly, and with a jolt arrives back where it started.
“One of the great themes of abstract art,” Barthel said, “is anything is possible — anything from a molecular level to a celestial level.”
A Monet landscape, she said, “is beautiful and enjoyable and peaceful and relaxing, but you know what you’re looking at. I think Rick’s work really inspires creativity and stimulates the imagination — and still is equally as beautiful as an oil painting of a flower.”
On the way out of the gallery, Sherwin suddenly brought the wheelchair to a halt.
Rick Hasse was reaching toward something. It was a potted banana palm, its smooth green skin interrupted by ridges resembling the scales of a fish.
“I’d like to scan that,” he said.
Rob Wolfe can be reached at 603-727-3242 or at rwolfe@vnews.com.