First, Key West
Several years ago, we started this year off with a week in Key West, Florida, flying down on Monday, Feb 17, and returning on Friday, Feb 21. Now this posting will be about the particular street artist we saw working the tourist trade on the Key West sidewalk that runs by the entrance to the world famous residence of Ernest Hemingway in the 1930’s: the Hemingway House.
A Key West Street Artist’s Figurative Expressionism:
the Emotional Expression of Abstraction through Figurative Forms
There was only one fellow peddling his sketches (ink and oils) on the street there the afternoon we visited the Hemingway house: his name turned out to be Scott–Scott Gruppe. His work was figurative: bodies with heads, portraits of faces, etc. But his work was also abstract: he sees no need to render works formally “realistic,” but instead used a very parsimonious technique of applying ink lines (or strips of thin black oil or Sharpie narrow point marker) over thin scrapings of pigment, oil pigment.
The street artist we found outside the Hemingway House, Scott Gruppe, worked in a technique that would be characterized as not either 1) fully representational realism on the one extreme or 2) abstract on the other extreme, but as what is labeled as figurative expressionism. . .a technique that falls at some sort of point along a scale between good ol’ figurative realism on one extreme and non-figurative abstract painting on the other.
Here is the Key West street artist, Scott Gruppe (in a red shirt), with one of his customers in front of the brick wall that separates the grounds of the Hemingway house from the streets it sits among:
If you notice, the two works being held for us to view are figures. People, I’d say and you’d say as well. But the figures aren’t just substitutes for camera images of those two people being depicted; no, they have clearly been manipulated by the artist (Scott Gruppe) to omit 90 percent of the detail in a fully representational painting, emphasizing, instead, just a few facets: rather sparse, almost “cartoonish” representation of facial features (there are eyes, a nose, and a mouth present in black marks), and limbs. Shadow? Well, there are none showing up as shades of gray and black; but there are hints of shadows in the tinting pigmentation in oils that the artist quite literally scrapes across the canvas with a plastic palette knife. So the works are not fully abstract, because figures are portrayed which are in some small sense “representational.”
Examples of the Work Gruppe Sells to Tourists
As should make sense to you, the reason Gruppe sets up his ink-and-oil works outside of Hemingway’s House is . . . to catch the eyes of tourists waiting in line to purchase their tickets there at the counter inside the opening in the brick wall.
So don’t be surprised among the mix of works he tries to sell are his rendition of cats (as in Hemingway’s cats):
But, Scott also has his ubiquitous human faces there on the sidewalk as well (these are on Italian marble tiles):
Here are several more, this time on matting material:
We were so taken by the work that we purchased the set of cats shown above (they are each somewhere in the order of 10 or 11 inches by 1.5 to 2 inches; priced as $5 to $7 each, depending on how many your purchased, and how you bargained with him). But then I asked if he had any larger works on canvas, to which he said yes, and asked if we wanted to stop by his home/studio that evening, after he finished at the Hemingway House. We said yes, we would be there at 6 p.m.
We found his apartment (the lower floor of the invariably two-story houses in Key West) and rifled through his canvas works, finding one we took with us and another that he is going to ship to us. Here is the one we bought and took with us (an 14×18 piece on canvas board, carrying it in a touristy Key West tote bag we bought for the occasion to carry on the our Southwest Airlines flight back to OKC:
If you would like to see more of Scott Gruppe’s work, go to the GruppeArt Facebook site that his girlfriend put together for him. Notice that he has a couple of favorite subjects he likes to work on, like musicians:
But, I just love the faces Scott does:
Had fun in Key West doing touristy things (like Hemingway House, Truman White House, the Board Walk down by where the cruise ships dock, etc.). But we really liked finding the hidden gem called Scott Gruppe.
Post Script: Gruppe Family of Painters
I won’t cover it here, but before you throw up your nose in contempt of a “street artist” in Key West, know that Scott is the third generation of oil painters from the Boston area. Scott’s grandfather, Emile Gruppe, formed the Gloucester School of Painting (1940 – 1970), a tradition of seafaring and harbor painters. From the Netherlands, Emile came to the New England to settle.
Scott’s father, Robert Gruppe, followed in that marine painting tradition as well:
Scott broke out of his father’s wishes for him to do the same, went to Europe instead for 10 years, painting in the Scandinavian countries and in Belgium and in the Netherlands, and returned to the States not to go back to New England, but to locate in Key West instead.
He told us it has been several years since his father has talked to him.
Artistic Finds 