On the Road with Creative Oasis Day Trippers™ – Our First Trip!

Static on AM radio…Stuckey’s…pillow forts in the back seat…Mad Libs…vending machine snacks and the smell of gasoline as Dad refueled the car…motor court motels with fenced in swimming pools…cannon-balling into those pools the reward for a long day traveling in a car with no air-conditioning in the sweltering Texas heat.

These were a sampling of road trip memories we shared during the first Creative Oasis Day Trippers™ outing. Sunday, March 6, 2011 we headed to Fort Worth to take in the special exhibit, Ed Ruscha: Road Tested at the Modern Art Museum. Prior to meeting up at the museum, we’d tapped into memories from the road trips of our youth to access words, images and phrases as inspiration to write haikus.

Asphalt ribbon winds

On to the next motel light

Flashing on…off…on

Our docent with Light Cloud, Dark Cloud by Mark Rothko 1957

A wonderful docent led us through an enlightening tour featuring highlights of the permanent collection and the complete Rushca show. It was very cool the way pieces from the permanent collection such as Camouflage Botticelli (Birth of Venus) (1963-64) by Alain Jacquet and Light Cloud, Dark Cloud (1957) by Mark Rothko wove their way nicely into our road trip themed experience. 

Jill with Camouflage Botticelli (Birth of Venus) (1963-64) by Alain Jacquet

Vonda shooting Andy Warhol

Cool hipstimatic shot by Vonda Hussey* of Ladder for Booker T. Washington (1996) by Martin Puryear

Another great hipstamtic shot by Vonda Hussey

After our tour, we adjourned to the café to grab a drink and create collage postcards with images from old travel books and posters as well as Texas road maps. We wrote messages to ourselves on our finished cards, reminders that this type of immersive creative experience is, in additional to being fun, just plain good for the soul! The Day Trippers will receive their postcards in the future when I mail them out to serve as a gentle reminder. (It’s always nice to receive a piece of real mail that’s not a bill.)

Next month Creative Oasis Day Trippers™ will meet up at the Dallas Museum of Art for the Gallery Talk: Frank Lloyd Wright: The Man Behind the Studio. Contact me here to reserve your space and for registration information. Be sure to register by April 3rd to insure you’ll receive the pre-trip creative prompts and meet-up instructions.

All the best from my creative oasis to yours,

Jill

p.s. Check out the beautiful photography of Vonda Hussey at www.vondahussey.com.