John Lennon drew long before he was in the Beatles, becoming an accomplished student at one of the UK's leading art schools. When the iconic band split up, Lennon put his musical activities aside for several years to spend time with his new family but kept right on drawing; maybe more than ever. If he had never even met Paul, George and Ringo, someone in an excellent position to know thinks Lennon would have done at least as well in the art world as he did in the recording studio.
"Most definitely," says Lynne Clifford, curator of the traveling exhibit "The Art of John Lennon," which opens today at Houston's Off the Wall Gallery.
"Yoko has sometimes said [that] I think he'll someday probably be known equally well for his drawings as his music," adds Clifford. "I mean, he was really a renaissance man -- I know people throw that terminology around a lot, but he was a composer, a musician, a poet, an artist. I mean, there wasn't anything that he couldn't do."
Clifford has worked for Ono since 1987. Before that, Lennon's widow had come to the art marketing/publishing firm where Clifford was working and said she wanted to "share John's art with the world." When the terms of that agreement were up, Ono hired Clifford directly.
"She is 100 percent hands-on with everything that has to do with John's artwork," Clifford says of Ono. "She selects the images that are going to be created into the limited-edition prints [and] gives us background and storylines about where they were or what John was doing or thinking when he was drawing them. It's a pleasure working for her."
The exhibit now in Houston runs through Sunday and features 72 total pieces. (Off the Wall is adjacent to Nieman-Marcus in the Galleria.) According to Clifford, the collection on display here spans the years from 1964 -- the height of Beatlemania -- through the years shortly before John's tragic death in 1980 at the hands of the assassin Mark David Chapman. He was just 40 years old.
According to Clifford, the Lennon archive contains drawings signed by the future Beatle as young as ages nine and ten years old, when she says he would draw famous characters in British history like Robin Hood or the warring Normans and Saxons. As a youth, he spent three years at the Liverpool College of Art and became famous for his spot-on caricatures of his classmates. Music temporarily won out when Lennon co-founded the Beatles in 1960, but he hardly put down his pen once the band got going.
"He would be at a board meeting and drawing art on the edges of the papers that he was reviewing," says Clifford, who will be at Off the Wall Saturday and Sunday giving talks about the exhibition's various pieces. "He never stopped drawing."
Lennon was often thought of as the "sarcastic" Beatle -- Paul was sweet, George quiet and Ringo, well, Ringo -- but during our conversation, Clifford uses the word "whimsical" several times when describing his art. After the Beatles split, Clifford says Lennon enjoyed walking around New York's Upper West Side, where encounters with starstruck fans would often inspire sketches like the one at the top of this article.
"Drawing for him was a way of coming out of himself," notes Clifford. "He drew his whole life."
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