Sonny Goes to the Art Gallery

Even though I live right around the corner from it - literally, I'm ashamed to say that I only actually visit the London Regional Art Gallery once or twice a year. Unless they have something going on that I really want to see. But they seldom do.

I didn't really want to see this newly-discovered Paul Peel painting of a big dog, but I did want to see what one can find at a yard-sale in Ohio when you have a couple thousand in cash on you and hope to find something that's really worth a few hundred thou. Apparently, they do garage sales differently down there.

Anyway, the oil painting of the dog was pretty good. An authentic Paul Peel? I don't know - as the rest of the Peel exhibit demonstrates, Paul is better known for his paintings of nude children than dogs.

But as a painting of a Saint Bernard it was remarkably well done. All that was missing was a cigar and a pawful of a winning flush. Apparently, Paul did this painting as a 17-year-old and it won a blue-ribbon at the Western Fair. It's certainly better than what I could do. And it does have that warm fire-place lit feel characteristic of all his work. And it is a darn good painting of a Saint Bernard - and who doesn't love a big Saint Bernard? But then again. It IS the work of a 17-year-old and looking at the painting up close you realize that although Paul's heart is in the right place, that's not always the case with his brush-strokes.

That show is in the basement of the gallery. I thought it might have been up on the third floor so when I came in from the street, I raced through the lobby ("Hey, no running or horse-play in the gallery, young man!" yells out the guard at the lobby desk. I shot back with "You're not the boss of me!") and caught the elevator one floor up.

Lots of good stuff up there. Portaits from the gallery's Permanent Collection of local old guys and some gals who haven't lived here in over a century or so. Photos from Beta Photos on Richmond of long-gone London street scapes and graduation photos of now-famous Londoners who haven't lived her since graduation.

And contrasting all this is an exhibition from the graduating class of the Fine Art Department of Fanshawe College. A lot of it is what you might expect - young kids striving not to do something that would be picked up in a yard sale in Ohio in one hundred years. Small chance of that happening. But there a show by one student who came up with the goods in a way that mananaged to be representational and shocking at the same time. I won't spoil the surprise. I will tell you that it involves her obsession with crows. Big black crows.

But it was when I decided to leave that I came upon the highlight of my visit. In fact, it's probably been the biggest single cultural mind-fuck that I've had in years. Probably since the first time I watched 'The Matrix.'

I was coming down the stairs from the top floor and there it was right in front of me. I had managed to miss it when I came in because I had been in such a hurry to get to the dog painting that I went right by it. Or maybe I didn't even notice it because of it's subject matter. It was wall-paper. An entire wall of wall-paper. And I'm talking about a wall which would be about the length and height of my entire house.

There's a shot of it at the top of this post.

This is what the gallery says about it - "Responding to an invitation to create a site-specific installation for our centre gallery, artist Eric Snell has devised a wall-paper project. The entire wall, 7 metres high X 14 metres wide, is covered by a commercially-available revival French toile pattern, which originated in the late 18th century.

"Snell views the project "both as cultural social anthropological comment about 'us' and the world we live in, a visual metaphor of our day-to-day life, repetitive, ordinary and endless."

"A contemporary jolt is the anachronism of a large flat-screen television playing a continuous video of the wall-paper itself. It is a sign of ubiquity; flat-screens in homes and public places, and being 'on' all the time regardless of the content."

... you know, this show is one of the reasons most people don't go to publicly-funded art galleries. They believe the people running the place are making fun of them - and with their own tax-dollars no less. They think these 'artists' guys are pulling one over on them. Being paid thousands of dollars for something their five-year-old could do better.

I won't comment about how much the guy was paid for this, or if he actually put the wall-paper up himself or if he was able to buy the stuff on sale or at least get a good deal for buying in bulk. I don't care about that. Small potatoes. The government wastes millions on much more dubious stuff than this exhibit. And if Snell's installation inspires just one kid to become an artist, or if it brings joy into the heart of another Sonny Drysdale, then it's worth the expense.

I don't feel the way most people might about this kind of thing. I walked out of the place with a big smile on my face. That wall-paper really made my day. At the moment, Eric Snell is my favorite artist.

The best part is the flat-screen television. Eric didn't content himself with making his 'comment' by sticking up a painting of the very same wall-paper or even a framed photo of the same thing. Nor by using a television with the pattern of the wall-paper on the screen as you would a photo on your computer's desk-top.

Oooohhhh, nooooo! That would be too easy. So Eric filmed a LIVE video of the wall-paper and that's what we see. Playing endlessly. Now, that my friends, is pure GENIUS.

Mowing the Grass

Almost cut my lawn. It happened just the other day. It was getting kinda long.

But I didn't. And I wonder why. Guess I felt like letting my freak flag fly.

Yesterday I finally got myself together. And got down to it. I couldn't put it off any longer. My new lawn-mower sat there in the corner of the back-yard mocking me. Sat where it had been since being parked there over two weeks ago after we bringing it home and not even trying it out.

It just sat there taunting me, making fun of my laissez-faire attitude towards yard maintenance. "Toro," it teased. "Toro, toro." My freak flag had been replaced by the image of a big red cape, egging me on. Just like in the 'Bugs Bunny' cartoons. So I got up, yanked three times on the rope and fired that baby up. Time to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Now, please understand - I try to be a 'fair' man and a pride myself on knowing good character when I see it. I don't judge a lawn by the length of its blades of grass. Or by the unkempt fringe along its perimeters. Or by the weeds it may attract.

But I'll tell you this - when I do get out of that vinyl-strap fold-up chair and push a big hunka set of rotating blades on wheels around my yard, well, that grass had better damn well look like it has been cut when I'm finished. I'm not one of these modern 'progressive' yard men. When I cut a lawn, it's gotta look cut.

Not like when my teenage son does it. The other week I gave the boy five bucks and told him to go do a lawn cut. An hour later he comes in and says he's done. I look out the window and ask, "Done what?" And he says, "I cut the grass." I look out again, rub my eyes, give my head a shake and I says to him, "Oh yeah - and which ONE did you cut?!"

Kids today. Some day they'll realize that there's no better feeling than looking upon a vast panorama and the scent of a freshly shorn lawn. One that you have mowed yourself.

I KNOW that feeling. But I don't know it often. Once a lawn is cut, I don't really feel like doing it again for another month or so. I like to be able to gaze upon my handywork and savour the view as long as possible. After about three weeks of appreciation, it will rain for a week straight and then the grass will shoot up five inches overnight and I have no choice but to cut the damn thing anyway. Time marches on.

Until yesterday, for the past 30 years, my instrument of choice was a rotary-blade push mower. It was powered not by gasoline or electricity - but by good old-fashioned human propulsion. Putting one foot in front of the other and then repeating that process, you got behind it and pushed. It was a 'Yardman.' Top of the line some 50 years ago when rotary-blade push-mowers were all the rage.

But through a bizarre series of circumstance, I have recently come into possession of a gas-powered machine. I'm not one to look a gift goat in the mouth. It's a 'Toro' - top of the line. The self-propelled 'Personal Pace' model. Meaning that you barely have to touch it to get it moving. You could cut the whole lawn pushing that mower using just that one muscle in your baby finger.

It's also a lot more complicated than my old 'Yardman.' Turns out there is a device on the wheels so you can adjust the cutting height of the grass. And it turns out the previous owner apparently liked a bit of length to his lawn. He had it on the 'high' setting.

The result being that when I had finished, unless you had actually seen me at it, you wouldn't even know that I had just cut the grass.

So I had a little look-see, realized my oversight in not making the proper adjustments for a lower cut, and then sat down with a bottle of pop. I'll be damned if I was going to mow the damn lawn again. It had its chance. It can wait another two or three weeks.

But the more I looked at it, the more I came to like it. All the tall spindly crab-grass had been cut down. All the weeds had been levelled to the same length of the rest of the grass. In short, it looked pretty damn good. It looked like a lawn that wasn't yelling out - "Hey, look at me! Look at me! Like my new haircut?!"

And that reminded me of an old episode of 'The Andy Griffith Show.' Floyd the barber is telling Andy about one of his 'sharp' customers, a wealthy out-of-towner who once came in and when asked if he wanted the 'works' or just a trim, the fellow replied that he wanted "a haircut that doesn't look like a haircut."

Well, of course, being a proud practicioner of the art of tonsorial care, Floyd is astonished at such a notion - "Can you imagine that?" he incredulously asks Andy. "Getting a haircut - and not caring if everybody didn't know that you just got a haircut?! ... Say, that's class."

And that's what my backyard now looks like. A lawn that doesn't look like it was just cut. Mind you, it's neat and trim. The blades of grass are a uniform two inches tall. And you would never know that I had just cut it the day before. Now, that's class.