By Julian Gunn
My plan was to see the exhibition of Leonard Cohen’s prints at a leisurely hour on Saturday morning, after some strong coffee and a wander up Oak Bay avenue. I knew that the Avenue Gallery resided there, theoretically stuffed with the evidence of Cohen’s vision, tucked between a Starbucks and Ivy’s Bookshop. I’d asked my friend J. to come along, but his schedule was less flexible than mine, so he called the gallery Friday night to see if he could run by after work (the sneak!)—and they told him the show was over. The newspaper and the website showed the wrong end date.
He texted me the news. I railed against fate in a few brief bursts of angry typing, and then J. updated me: the gallery owner had revealed that there were still a few stacks of prints standing up against the walls. We could see them if we wanted to, provided we arrived before five-thirty. It was almost five. We bolted to Oak Bay in J.’s car, Poncho.
It was true: the show was down and the gallery folk were in the midst of redecorating for the next exhibition. The whole room smelled of fresh paint and thwarted longing. The remaining works of Cohen stood on the floor in three close files of matching frames. The large and medium prints rested against the back wall, and the small ones were almost under our feet near the cash desk. J. knelt down and with reverence parted the frames. There it was, Leonard’s sigil and stamp, the Unified Heart: two interlocking hearts in a circle, a modified Star of David.
I’ll level with you, friends. I believe that Leonard Cohen is a saint. I don’t adhere to any faiths with saints in them, but I know a holy fool when I see one. If you were at his concert with me on Wednesday night, you saw him too, frail as a bird in a black suit, tipping his hat to us and the beautiful, terrible joke of mortal life. (That Voice. Inimitable. Sinking over six decades from a quavering tenor into an almost subsonic bass tremor rolling through the flesh of the earth itself. That Voice, now beginning to grow ghostly. It frightened me, but it made him laugh.) I say frail, yet he played three encores. We didn’t leave the Save-on-Foods arena (which Cohen described as “this difficult space”) until almost midnight.
Still, we are here to talk about Art. In parallel with Cohen’s gig, the Avenue Gallery exhibited a travelling display of his work. Or so I surmise—I never actually saw it on the walls. The question I was asked to contemplate was a reasonable one: was it Leonard Cohen’s great gift for visual art, or only his massive fame, that merited a display of his prints? We know he can write a song, but can he draw?
It is an article of faith with me (I have faith in any number of things, if not a central bureaucracy of divinity) that anything made with true attention, honesty, and compassion will produce beauty. I think you can tell. I think that it shows.
I think it shows in Cohen’s prints. There’s skill in the execution: a thick calligraphic line that twists to form a face, slightly abstracted Grecian forms for beloved women. There’s clumsiness too–the same lumpy pixellation that confused me in the art for his album Dear Heather.
The visual art’s precise analogy is his music. I think even we who love Leonard above rubies can agree that Mr. Cohen didn’t start out as a great musician or vocalist. He began instead as someone with a profound gift of attention—to the sudden flaring of the sacred in the ordinary world, to the nuances of desire and longing, to his own internal states. There’s a kind of narcissism in his work, but it is a wrenchingly humble self-contemplation that deserves a better name. Likewise, his visual work is full of self-portraits, but these are not self-aggrandizing images. Quick tracings of the deep canyons in an old man’s face, they bear wry inscriptions:
yes
always somewhat
off balance
but peaceful
in his work
peaceful
in his vertigo
an old man
with his pen
deeply familiar
with his
predicament.
That gift of attention, worked on by years of effort and humility, has produced something more than artfulness, though I think his songs are great art. The only word that comes close enough is holy, if there were some version of that word that insisted on only precisely the feeling of bliss and peace and mutual surrender. The songs have been transformed further by the musicians Cohen brought together to tour with him. The liquid violin of Alexandru Bublitchi, the incredible fingerwork of Javier Mas, the playful and sure percussion of Rafael Gayol, the golden vocals and songwriting gifts of Sharon Robinson—these would all be worth a ticket in themselves. We had all those, and we had him too.
“It kind of fits, though, doesn’t it?” J. pointed out as we rushed to the Gallery in pursuit of the remaining fragment of the art show. “Somehow it’s better this way, to come too late and to almost miss it. It’s like something from his songs.” And he was right.
Julian Gunn is a Victoria writer and music lover.
