52.75 your up Yoko Ono on the art of John Lennon FROM PAGE 1D lines." Like many British rock musicians of his time, Lennon went to art school. He attended the Liverpool Art Institute from 1957-60 after failing his O-levels, the British equivalent of high school graduation exams. Sketches of odd-looking people and James Thurber like cartoons accompanied the short writings in his books In His Own Write and A Spaniard i in the Works, both published in the mid-'60s. After marrying Ono in 1969, Lennon exhibited a series of works known as the "Bag One" Portfolio at the London Art Gallery. The portfolio included sketches of the couple's wedding ceremony and honeymoon, as well as a number of erotic drawings. Scotland Yard confiscated the lithographs and closed the exhibition the day after it opened. The portfolio is now part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Ono began releasing John's artwork in 1986 with a series of prints entitled This Is My Story Both Humble and True. She has since released three other series and individual works as well, many of them dealing with the later years of the couple's marriage and the time Lennon spent as a Sean, drawn in 1977, and He Tried to Face Reality, a whimsical 1979 sketch which shows Lennon enjoying the view from a cloud. "John's art is like contemporary folk art," Ono says. "You can really, directly communicate with it. You can see it and you can feel it. An artwork that you can communicate with without knowing art history is very important, I think." Ono compares the sketches to Lennon's music and says they are almost like pop song versions of visual art. Yoko Ono "(John) was a very inspired artist" househusband. "He was drawing all the time," Ono says. "He was drawing since he was 9. The drawing he was doing when he was 9 is really a beautiful, beautiful, matured work. He was very talented." Lennon's works are usually simple, pen-and-ink sketches that convey a simple scene or mood. The pieces on display at Imagine Gallery include signed lithographs of Bag One, I Do and Exchange of Rings, all three drawn in 1969 and included in the Bag One Portfolio. Newer pieces include Beautiful Boy, a portrait of @Lennon's son, "He did the sketches and drawings in the very same way he had done his songs," Ono says. "He was a very inspired artist, and when he was inspired, he just did it very quickly. That's how he composed his songs as well. It was always to do with his honest expression of his feelings. That comes out in his drawings as well, I think. "The best pop songs really stir the emotions, inspire you and give you energy, remind you that you're not alone in the sufferings and joys of life. "That kind of pop song is very important, and the kind that you want to sing to your lover and share it. John's songs have that quality. His drawings have that, too." Lennon's art, both visual and mu- sical, continually evolved while he was living with Ono, from the avantgarde experiments of The Wedding Album to the happy domesticity of Double Fantasy, and from the sketchy eroticism of the Bag One drawings to the romantic warmth of later works. When asked how living with Lennon changed her life, Ono has a difficult time finding specifics, though she does say he helped teach her to write pop songs. "My songs were a bit like e.e. cummings poetry with a little 12- tone," she says of early musical attempts. "Then went into a folk song kind of thing. "The first pop song - if you can say pop song I ever wrote was Listen, the Snow Is Falling. I did that before we got together. Then, when we got together, I made it into a real pop song. When you see the original, you couldn't pick out why it was a pop song. "I went into a very exciting trip of writing many songs. Though I was writing songs before that, I was kind of stuck in my intellectualism. The music was so difficult you couldn't breathe in it. The poetry, too, was too esoteric. "He gave me life, let's put it that way. That's a lot, isn't it?" Brian Mansfield is a Nashville-based free writer.
