A Force of Nature
The artist's portrait, painted by his son

By BEN TRISSEL '89

im Trissel's primary occupation was painter. He knew at his core how a painting was constructed and he treated each work as a complex equation, finding the grace between color and composition, between the history of the subject and personal expression. From the still-lifes of the late '60s and '70s to his abstract paintings on four-by-four feet sheets of plywood, his work was always subtle, always breathtaking, always changing.

As a professor at Colorado College, my father taught generations of students how to think through art. Not just how to make a pretty picture, but how to use the language of art to speak. Not all the students who went through the art program took his lessons, but those who did developed into fine artists and designers in their own right. Former students from each era would return every few years to show their work to my father, seeking somehow his approval and to beam with pride at his acknowledgement. I saw some students, like Wendy Fey '82 and Stephen Wood '84, become teachers in their own right. A higher compliment could never be paid.

It was my father's tertiary profession that won him his most acclaim: the role of printer. Jim began The Press at Colorado College in the late '70s with a beautiful old Asburn Cylinder press and a Chase Platen Press, the kind that takes fingers off of unwary printers. His early printed work was a combination of ink washes and crisp typography. As he reconciled the printed page through the eyes of a painter, he printed "The Shakespeare Sonnets," a broadside commemorating Zeb Pike's attempted ascent of Pikes Peak, and early books like John Drury's "Fire in the Wax Museum" and Wendell Berry's "Reverdure."

By the mid-1980s, this reconciliation intersected beautifully with the "Printed Poem/Poem as Print" series of broadsides -- 24 pieces, each manufactured to their own unique specifications, each posing its own questions. As the marriage of painter and printer became complete, it was this series that won Jim his first national recognition. Shown at the New York Public Library and the Newbury library and selected as one of the "Eighty Best of the Eighties" by the New York Public Library, this series that included works by poets Dana Gioia, Donald Justice, Robert Penn Warren and Amy Clampitt finally got Jim where he wanted to be with the printed word. The text and the image were no longer separate entities on the page but combined to enhance one another, until both became transparent and the message of the words perfect.

Jim was always a little bit flustered by the recognition he received as an artist. I remember how shy he became, turning red and stammering through his words, as he gave the introductory address at the Collegiate Book Arts Conference in 1988. It was a rare and terribly endearing moment. I also remember working with him around the bed of a press, the place where he taught all the lessons I keep with me to this day. We worked fast and furiously, speaking few words as paper was fed into grippers and ink and registration were adjusted in miniscule amounts. It was a dance, but a harsh one. He brooked no mistakes and no slacking when a press run was in progress. I remember him blowing up at me for letting my concentration slip, and punishing me by having me sort endless type cases.

I can still hear him say, in his Iowa brogue, the most important lesson he ever had to teach: "You can't reach heaven without standing on a pile of crap." The complex message of those simple words was this: You cannot treat your work preciously. In order to get something right you have to do it over and over again until the final product matches your unreasonable expectations, until it measures up. I remember throwing out pages we had spent hours and hours printing because, for whatever reason -- humidity, ink viscosity, too much worn type, whatever -- the pages were just not right. He would throw up his hands and bellow and walk away from a frustrating press run, only to return later and do it all again. I remember once abandoning the initial layout of the Color for Letterpress book because the registration was off by a 1/32 of an inch. He stopped the press run, reconfigured the book's entire structure, and printed it right. One of the last things he told me was to always treat the work as a process, a progression, and never as a finished product within itself. The finished product is just an artifact of the work.

In 1998, Jim was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The tumor was inoperable. Like everything in his life, he treated the cancer unreasonably. He kept printing and painting and traveling. Late last year, I met up with him in San Francisco, his emaciated frame little more than a clumsy rack for his clothes. We sat around my brother's house, the three of us telling morbid jokes, easy in one another's company. His spirit was bright and his eyes shined and he looked damned good for a man with a terminal illness.

He managed to finish one last book, "The Waiting Room," a beautifully simple work that was solely an exercise in concise typography. With the help of Brian Molanphy '90 and Sally Hegerty '88, he would work in the morning, pulling pages, then return home to sleep all afternoon. He rallied himself each day and seemed to gather energy from the task. Toward the end I would call him and he would fill me in on the watercolors he was doing, his descriptions always technical, always about the investigation of the material. The work he was producing then was very simple and elegant and ephemeral. Just a few lines of color suggested the objects, the flowers, and the vases he was painting.

The last oil painting he was working on is a strange combination of all the lessons he had learned in his life as a painter. The colors bright and the lines loose, it is a combination of interior space and still-life, the color finally giving away spatially to an intense, scrumbled yellow. I cannot look at this piece without thinking that he was painting his exit. I watched him one night drag himself out of bed to work on this painting and it was like watching my father as I have always remembered him, a force of nature. His entire being was focused on the application of color, his concentration palpable. I left him that night, not wishing to interrupt, and came back half an hour later to find him back in bed, sleeping. Wet with new paint, the painting was a little more real, a little more resolved. That was the last night he worked on that piece.

Jim died August 20, 1999, at 3:45 p.m. The end was quiet.

For all of the rage of his life, for all of that eternally questing spirit, he died in a coma, breathing like a marathon runner until the breath just subsided. My first and best teacher, my beautiful, beautiful father, was gone.

As I pack away my father's books, his paintings and his strange artifacts, I find what I miss most about him is how he taught me to visually comprehend the world, how to have a critical ear and a critical eye. Up until that end, he was always teaching me. When I would show him one of my paintings, he would fix his eyes and stroke his beard for a good while before speaking. Sometimes the lesson would be complex, like how to compose within a cylindrical or a planer space for instance, or how to allow a strong line or block of color to dissolve. Sometimes the lessons would be simple, like, "look at Cezanne." Those lessons were always right on and I can savor the fact we shared the language of painting right up until the end.

It is fitting that, for all the words spoken in eulogy about my father, the most accurate epitaph I found was in his own handwriting in an old loose-leaf binder, decorated with a paper heart and the moniker "Dad," a gift, no doubt, from one of his daughters. The notebook was empty save for a few phrases. One phrase, the last one written into the book maybe years ago, summed up Jim and his desire to produce artwork.

'And silence, like a poultice, comes to heal the blows of sound.'
-Oliver Wendell Holmes

In silence, now, we shape our memories of Jim. No longer able to push against him, against his resistance, against his friendship, against his teaching, we are moored in our stories. For those of us who were in some way deeply affected by him, we have no choice but to stare now with wonder into the void he left. No choice but to fill that vacuum with grief. Hopefully, eventually, this grief will subside, replaced by our respective stories, memories and reflections. Amen.

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