*Daily Telegraph! New art work from John!*
Mr. John James Whelan
The following is written by Catherine Milner of the Daily Telegraph
and was released today in the Ottawa Citizen:
LONDON- A collection of John Lennon sketches depicting the singers
drug-fuelled vision of an island escape from Beatlemania has come to light
at the home of the man who introduced him to Yoko Ono.
John Dunbar, the ex-husband of singer Marianne Faithfull, has
discovered drawings inside a sketchbook he took on a trip to Ireland with
Lennon.
It is estimated the drawings could fetch more than $200,000 at
auction.
"I can't believe it - most of John's drawings are frightful," Dunbar
said this week.
Lennon and Dunbar's trip to Ireland typified the surreal adventures
of the Beatles and the rock aristocracy in the late Sixties.
Dunbar recalls that Lennon had spotted a newspaper advertisement for
"an island off Ireland" being sold for $2,000. While attending one of the
decade's notorious pyschedelic "happenings", the 24 Hour Technicolour Dream
party at Alexandra Palace, London, Lennon determined to buy it.
"It was something to do,," Dunbar explained.
They flew to Dublin the following morning, from where they travelled
across Ireland to the west coast. There they hired a boat to Dornish Beg--
the tiny island sticking out of the Atlantic that had caught Lennon's fancy.
But they journey was warped by copious consumption of LSD, and the
increasingly chaotic nature of the drawings chart the singer's mental
disintegration.
The men had started taking the drug at the Technicolour Dream party,
Dunbar said, and continued without a break for four or five days.
"I had taken it first as early as 1963, whereas John had only
recently started, so I think he was probably more affected by it."
"The island was more like a couple of small hills joined by a
gravelly bar with a cottage on it," Dunbar said. "When we got there
John sat down and started drawing."
Apart from the one Dante-esque drawing covering two pages which
features hollowed eyes, ghoulish faces and fat nude females in an
inchoherent scrawl of lines and squiggles, Lennon drew up architectural
plans of a large octagonal tower or lighthouse on the island in which
he wanted to live. But he never went to live on the island because of
his relationship with Yoko Ono.
Lennon later gave the island away to a stranger who turned up
with his family at Apple, the Beatles self-founded record company,
at a time when the groups hippy ideals made them the target of fleecers.
Lennon was later forced into giving up LSD by the "thousands of
bad trips" he experienced. He was later privately to admit that he was
lucky to have regained his mental equilibrium afterward.
* Hope you enjoyed the article in light of the timing with A3.*
John
--
Miguel Balbuena
The article doesn't mention when this trip to the island took place.
Miguel Balbuena