http://timestranscript.canadaeast.co...article/962008
Leonard Cohen sketches on display in Montreal
Published Monday February 22nd, 2010
Free exhibit of drawings continues until May 9
By Nelson Wyatt
THE CANADIAN PRESS
MONTREAL - Every so often, when Leonard Cohen wanted a break from finding just the right word while writing, he'd turn his pen to his notebook and sketch.
THE CANADIAN PRESS
Sketches by singer Leonard Cohen will be displayed at the Montreal High Lights Festival.
"The drawings are just something he's done his whole life to interrupt the actual process of writing -- a way to do something when you're not writing the next line or the perfect rhyme but you still have a pen in your hand and a paper in front of you," says his son Adam.
Now these drawings have come home to Montreal and are being shown until May 9 in a free exhibit titled "The Leonard Cohen Artworks" at the Montreal High Lights Festival.
Three of the drawings are original works by Leonard Cohen, and they are displayed alongside some 50 high-quality numbered reproductions. The works are on sale for about $1,500 to $6,000.
Adam Cohen, who is acting as spokesman for the exhibit, said drawing was always a favourite activity around the poet-novelist-singer-songwriter's home.
"One of my earliest memories of any rainy day is of us waking up and if we couldn't play outside we'd all (in the family) draw . . . at the kitchen table," the L.A.-based Adam Cohen, 37, recalled.
"He'd break out the crayons and we'd sketch and draw and share images with each other," he said of his father. "I'd often find the drawings that are now exhibited today, 30 years later, in his notebooks or laying around the house. He refers to them as his doodles."
The sketches have various subjects, although they tend toward self-portraits with wry comments written on them, studies of women, and various objects such as furniture and glasses.
"It's nice because these are actually people that I've known, places that I've been, chairs that I've sat on, smoked my first cigarette in, kissed the first girl in that chair, the guitar I've picked up, glasses I've tried on in the mirror," Cohen said.
"It had a particularly touching quality to me to actually see all of these images in one place, especially this particular exhibition in Montreal where all the pieces are hanging and the light from a Montreal street comes in and illuminates them.
"There's a feeling that these images belong in Montreal and belong to Montreal," said Cohen, whose 75-year-old father grew up in the city and still visits regularly.
But Cohen stressed that his father isn't seeking to be recognized as a visual artist along with all his other talents.
Leonard Cohen even says in the welcoming message for the show: "I call my work acceptable decorations."
That's an example of his father's "paranormal humility," Adam Cohen said.
"It really did take endless prodding and insistence for him to finally allow these drawings to be exhibited," Cohen said of the show, which has already been seen in several other cities but never before in Montreal.
Cohen said his father is a huge fan of French artist Henri Matisse, and his artwork has been compared to that of surrealist Jean Cocteau.
"My sister and I would try and correct him when he was doing self-portraits, saying 'Dad, you don't look anything like that,' " Adam Cohen recalled with a chuckle. They'd tell him: " 'Why are you drawing your nose so crooked? Your eyes are bigger.' "
"Of course, now I understand that this was something called 'style.' "
Cohen said he doesn't know why his father chose to sketch, other than he found it an enjoyable way to pass the time.
"The only thing that he's ever explained to me was that he got a great amount of joy out of the meditative quality of doing a self-portrait every morning while he was in this little hotel in Bombay visiting a friend," he said.
"It was a way of chronicling his mood," he added. "(It) was a self-effacing exercise and that was satisfying to him."
Adam Cohen is a singer-songwriter in his own right with a new album in the works. He said the disc, titled "Like a Man," somewhat resembles his father's celebrated work in the 1960s and 1970s.
But Adam Cohen, like his dad, stressed he's not a visual artist.
"My sister is quite good at it, my mother is an excellent painter," he said. "It skipped me."
Leonard Cohen sketches on display in Montreal
