04 september 2014

Forrest Bess



Forrest Bess's home and studio in Chinquapin. (bron: Forrest Bess)



"In 1947, Forrest Bess moved to Chinquapin, a tiny unincorporated settlement at the end of a dirt road on the northeast side of East Matagorda Bay. “The peninsula is a lonely, desolate place,” he wrote, “yet it has a ghostly feeling about it—spooky—unreal—but there is something about it that attracts me to it—even though I am afraid of it.” He was determined to stay.

In a 1982 feature on Bess for Texas Monthly, Michael Ennis reported that “He built a shack on a concrete slab using the hull of a tugboat and copper sheets from the bottom of an old ferry, and he added a slanted concrete ‘prow’ to his little home that would, he hoped, withstand the battering of hurricanes. He continued to fish for a living and to record and paint his visions.” After Hurricane Carla hit in 1962, only the slab and the concrete prow of his shack remained. Bess rebuilt. In the end, it was the sun that forced Bess to move from Chinquapin. After having surgery on his nose for skin cancer in 1966, Bess moved to his mother’s house in Bay City." (bron: Glasstire)

> Forest Bess

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