Imagine...lennon For Kids

Sydney Morning Herald

Friday March 8, 2002

Steve Meacham

Two decades after his murder, the former Beatle has revealed another of his talents: children's illustrator. Steve Meacham reports.

WHEN his son Sean was born in 1975, John Lennon hung up his guitars and withdrew into domestic anonymity in the Dakota building in New York, telling wife Yoko Ono to take care of business while he played house husband.

The former Beatle recorded no songs and gave no concerts. And it is generally assumed that he stopped being creative. His controversial biographer Albert Goldman even claimed he become a heroin-racked, dishevelled recluse.

However, newly released illustrations, now being shown in Sydney, shed fresh light on ``the Dakota years", and prove not only that Lennon was mentally alert and creative, but that his familiar Goonish sense of humour never left him.

In all, 16 prints have been released. Drawn for his young son, they show his lifelong obsession with word-play and the absurd, familiar to anyone who has read his whimsical books, In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works.

There's a monkey chattering on a bush telephone. A frog marching purposefully across a landscape.

Ono launched the Real Love Collection in New York last September but the pictures have only just arrived at Imagine, the art gallery in Chifley Plaza devoted to Lennon's art. Each of the limited-edition prints has been signed by Ono and carries a Japanese woodchop mark which Lennon used. They sell for between $1650 and $2000 each.

The director of Imagine gallery, Maureen McCarthy says, ``Lennon originally drew them in pen and ink but they've been coloured by Yoko using the palette he used as a child. Some people might ask why she has released them. Her answer is that so much of their work was collaborative that it is legitimate."

Lennon met both his wives through art Cynthia when he was an art student in Liverpool and Yoko when he went to see one of her exhibitions in London.

The British police raided his own first art exhibition in 1970, confiscated eight erotic lithographs and charged the gallery with indecency. The case was thrown out of court and the lithographs now sell at the Imagine gallery for $20,000 each.

Now, bizarrely, Lennon's drawings for his son have become a commercial success in the United States. ``There's a whole range of fluffy toys and nursery furniture," says McCarthy. ``Lennon sheet sets are now the biggest-selling sheet sets for toddlers in the US. They're introducing a whole new generation to his work."