If you thought you knew all that’s in the small town of Hanover, I have a surprise. I, too, thought I knew all the nooks and crannies of this small town until a few days ago. I took a shortcut between Eastman’s Pharmacy and The Gap, and I noticed for the first time an inconspicuous underground art gallery. Hasse Gallery, to be exact.
People like to say that you can run into fellow Dartmouth alumni across the globe. When they say this, I don’t think they expect you to meet one just across the street in Hanover. While the sentiment still holds as true, I’d like to add that you can meet some of the most interesting people—people such as Eric Hasse—right near campus.
Established in October 2006 with the support of friend and fan Paul Olsen, Hasse Gallery has been the gallery and studio space of Eric Hasse ’80. Hasse has early onset Parkinson’s disease, and is unable to talk or hold a brush. However, through his newly digitized method of artistic expression, he is still able to practice visual arts on a daily basis.
Unlike a “usual” art gallery, where exhibition openings are held with wine, cheese, and artsy schmoozers throughout trying to make superficial conversation and win facetime, Hasse Gallery looks—and is—anything but that. With several pieces in a store display window, a “for lease” sign for a home taped on the window, and the interior of the gallery containing as many artworks as Beast’s Library in Beauty and the Beast, Hasse Gallery is more of a secluded oasis and trove of discovery than just another pretentious art gallery. At Hasse, all that is important is art and the free-flow of expression. Fortunately, the gallery was open that day, and I finally had a free afternoon to check it out.
Born in Palo Alto, California, Hasse moved to Connecticut when he was 7 years old, where he adjusted to life on the East Coast. An English major who graduated Dartmouth in three years (to save money, he wrote, to which I agreed), Hasse has also been committed to literary arts, particularly poetry. Even though he has not continued writing poetry, he continues to publish his work—one of which was through an International competition published in 2008 and was on display at Oxford.
After graduating from Dartmouth, Hasse was a chef at the 5-star hotel The Breakers in Palm Beach, Florida, ran Jesse’s Restaurant in 1980-1981, and toured Europe, North Africa, and Greece for 10 weeks. After his time working professionally in the culinary arts and traveling, he came back to the Upper Valley to work in various aspects of finance and ultimately raising capital for Internet start-ups. Despite his life on the fringes of the corporate world, as an artistic person, Hasse continued to write poetry, read all of Carl Jung’s works, and picked up visual arts (sumi ink drawings) in the 1980s, the decade before his diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease at age 35. He continued to work in finance until 2003, when the progression of Parkinson’s put him “at death’s door.” He writes that his health is “far better today since my deep brain stimulation neurosurgeries.” Still, the uncertainties of Parkinson’s causes him to be particularly vigilant of taking “each day as it dawns.”
Despite his condition, Hasse works at his gallery most days, creating giclées on canvas. Hasse defined a giclée as a French term meaning “ink spraying” to define the technical process of printing digital files. Currently, he scans different objects such as fabrics and combines different images into a single image. He particularly focuses on creating images from mundane objects I scan. Images from this series are extremely colorful with layers of texture, each seeming to accent the beauty of the objects within.
In some of his earlier works around 2003 with a focus on visual arts, he applied saturation to the black and white sumi ink drawings he made during the 1980s to produce color and create new works of art. Each digital image is made into a print, of which Hasse displays throughout his large gallery space. This entire process is done right in Hasse’s gallery, allowing him to be fully self-sufficient in making art. “I can’t imagine returning to paint. The possibilities for print series are huge,” writes Hasse, with a smile.
Besides displaying his work at the Hasse Gallery, Hasse is not interested in seeking fame or fortune, or to “fill the void with my visions in the usual careerist sense of narcissism.” He is most interested in “conveying my joy and wonder in the world of living,” especially his consideration of “the life immanent in all things and their luminosity—an outpouring of the spirit.” Carl Jung is one of his primary influences, particularly Jung’s idea of the Collective Unconscious. He also believes in the “Zen/Taoist concept of living in the present moment,” which is constantly apparent in his work.
Since The Dartmouth’s reporting of the opening of his gallery in 2006, Hasse has created 5,000 new prints. His goal is to make “10,000 digital images in honor of the Taoist ‘ten thousand things’ [their way of saying infinity] by my 30th reunion in June.”
Besides working at his studio, Hasse continues to “devour art books from the Sherman Art Library, make repeated visits to the Hood Museum of Art, and listen to and absorb more fully the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tsu.” With the help of his friends and family, he hopes to “continue my quiet work in the gallery space beneath The Gap…providing an oasis of contemplation in a boogie woogie world upstairs, outside, and far, far away.”
Amidst the countless aspiring artists and gallery owners, Hasse is indeed one of the most successful, though he may lack the grandiosity of more celebrated artists. Shedding the superficiality, prima donna attitudes, and unnecessary glamour associated with the arts, what Hasse conveys through his art and space is genuine curiosity and loyalty to the arts—a rare find these days with the loudness of the contemporary art world. In the manner he makes and presents his art, Hasse does have a unique voice to contribute to the contemporary art canon that should not be missed.
Finally, as I usually do with all Dartmouth alumni, I asked Hasse about how to make the most of one’s college years, and how to prepare for what’s to come after college. With that, I’ll leave you with his words:
“If you seek fame and fortune, I am not your counsellor. If you are in quest of a life comparatively contented and at peace with your modest place in the grand scheme of the Tao, I would encourage you to start your journey of a thousand miles with your first footsteps here at Dartmouth. Learn all you can from courses, experiences, and folks you meet along the road about the lessons of compassion and tenderness and let them ripple out from your center in the life ahead.
Finally, in the words of T.S. Eliot: ‘Teach us to care, and not to care. Teach us to sit still.’ …tough advice in our hustling world, but still the best if we are to survive as individuals, and as a species.
Oh, and have fun!”
