home

A

shton Whipple got a late start at art. In 1989, when he was 60, he painted his first watercolor. He quickly made up for lost time. While living in Oriental, Ashton developed a signature style. These weren’t gauzy watercolors but paintings and posters with deep, bold hues and simple uncluttered lines. Ashton’s work showed up on walls in Oriental and beyond, and he successfully promoted and sold it.

On Saturday March 28th, he’s offering his work for sale one last time in Oriental, with an “Art on the Porch” sale from 10am to 2pm at Marsha’s Cottage near the harbor.

All of this is coming about because of a series of events in the past few years.

This Ashton Whipple painting was turned into a poster to celebrate Oriental’s Centennial in 1999

After his wife Dorothy passed away 4 years ago, Ashton painted less. The home he built and shared with Dorothy on Styron Drive has now been sold and new residents are moving in. Ashton’s already moved to Jacksonville, Florida where he lives with his daughter. They’ll be making the trip back to Oriental one more time to sell his works on the 28th and say hello.

In a phone interview from his new home in Florida, he spoke about his life in Oriental and about his approach to watercolors and art.

First some backstory.

Marvin Bullock, one of his friends, says that Ashton and his late wife Dorothy “did what most of us dream about doing.”

A native of Detroit, Ashton had worked for a big sandpaper manufacturer near Niagara Falls. He was determined to retire at 55 from his marketing job with Carborundum. By happenstance, as he was approaching that age in the mid-1980s, the company was acquired by British Petroleum, which Ashton says, didn’t know what to do with sandpaper. A buyout package was offered.

The Whipples took it and then took off in their 27’ Cal (name: Amity — Ashton points out the punning possibilities.) They sailed out the St. Lawrence River, around Gaspe peninsula, down past Nova Scotia and the eastern US and eventually to the Bahamas. For 7 years, the “gypsied” as Ashton puts it, up and down the East Coast. An estimated 25,000 miles went under the keel during that time.

Ashton Whipple in a familiar spot by his Oriental home

On the way north and south, they’d tuck in to Oriental and tie up to their dock on a lot they owned near Pierce Creek. (Why Oriental? Ashton says that after spending his working years in Michigan and upstate NY, he wanted to get away from the North, “but I didn’t want to go to Florida.”) During those cruising years, the dock was a place to tie up and catch their breath.

In 1992 they stopped the full-time cruising, came ashore and built their home. Like many homes on low lying land in and around Oriental, theirs was elevated, and Ashton would make reference in emails and letters to being “high atop Mt. Pamlico.” Ashton painted and his Oriental-inspired work often featured hulls, sails and waterfront scenes. Dorothy meanwhile, headed up the Oriental Tree Board. (A tree near Town Hall is named for her.)

Yet while they’d become land-lubbers, the Whipples didn’t stop traveling. They spent many winters in southern Europe. Arriving with no advance reservations in a small town in Portugal, Italy, Spain or France, they’d make enquiries and rent an apartment for months at a time, usually in a town center.

“We became semi-locals,” Ashton says, citing a preference for the more “native” spots in the centers of towns over what he called, the ‘condo-villes’ that Northern Europeans flocked to. Those more rustic settings gave him additional material for his watercolors and he returned from those winters in Europe with landscapes and small town scenes to add to his collection.

One winter, the couple returned to live-aboard mode, renting a canal boat from the French Mediterranean to the Atlantic. “Do you know Van Gogh? This was Van Gogh country,” Ashton says “You’d go past a field and there are Van Gogh yellows and Van Gogh blues. You could see where he got it. “

Ashton himself didn’t dabble in the oils that Van Gogh did. It was better he says, to stick to the one medium, watercolors. But his watercolors draw on the jewel-like hues of the Impressionist. It took him a while to realize he could do that and that watercolors could be so vibrant

Ashton told a reporter for the Sun Journal a few years ago that a watercolorist he met on a trip to Portugal in the late 80’ set him on that path. “I was impressed with what he did and how his watercolors didn’t look pastel and flowery and his rocks looked like rocks.I always thought of watercolors as insipid pastel pinks and blues and the paper all folded up and I was never excited about it..” That changed once he picked up the brush. He only put it down 2 years ago.

As he approaches 81, Ashton says he forgets things. He’s candid about it. “I don’t pretend,” he commented while trying to recall a fact during our conversation, “Frankly, I’m beginning to lose a little bit.”

That said, Ashton talks with clarity about his work. For instance, ‘shapes’ in a painting. At first, he says, he “had difficulty grasping,” that a painting could be broken down in to shapes. The sails would be one shape. The sky another. A porch still another.

His point is that there shouldn’t be too many to overload the picture. For the sake of “unity,” he says “you want maybe no more than five ‘shapes’ in a painting. You “could have a complex painting,” he says, “but keep it simple in terms of shapes.”

In that there may be a carry-over from Ashton’s years as a marketing person. Another is the way he used the Internet to promote art. Ashton says that in his early working days, he remembers computers the size of two tennis courts; later, the firm he worked for was an early-adopter, using computers for billing and inventory. “I was on a team that did the installation,” he recalls.“We had to convince people it could be done.”

Fast forward a few decades to 2002. At the age of 74, he set up an on-line gallery to showcase not only his own work but the work of several other area artists; each had their own gallery.

Ashton’s work shows up off-line too, and in unexpected places. Ten years ago, “one of Ashton’s paintings was chosen to adorn Oriental’s centennial paraphernalia.” says his friend Marvin Bullock. “I still see caps and coffee mugs with the familiar line of sailboat hulls on the front.”

From an article done a few years back in the New Bern Sun Journal

He says he’s glad Ashton’s having the Art on the Porch event on March 28th. As Marvin put it, it’s “one last chance to purchase an original Whipple – - or at least to give the original a hug.”

Ashton Whipple, Art on the Porch, Saturday March 28, 10a – 2p at Marsha’s Cottage on Wall St, just a few steps from the harbor in Oriental.

Posted Monday March 23, 2009 by Melinda Penkava