John Lennon's art returns to Winter Park

John Lennon wasn’t at the London Arts Gallery as police tore his art exhibition “Bag One” down by the frames. But as the Beatles frontman returned to pick up the 14 drawings he’d hung there, only the six not deemed illegally obscene still adorned the now infamous walls. It was Jan. 28, 1970, nearly 43 years to the day before his once-controversial art is set to make another public appearance, this time along Park Avenue.

“When it’s a Picasso or something, they don’t dare touch it, but they said John Lennon is not a professional artist,” widow Yoko Ono said of the motive for the art-confiscating fracas. It started in a gallery and ended in a courtroom just as the Beatles were deciding they weren’t the Beatles anymore. “You’d say his name and people would say ‘Oh, you mean the pop star?’ Now people know how good he was as an artist.”

Ono’s speaking on the phone from somewhere in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, though she declined to specify where. The avant-garde artist just launched another charity exhibition of her husband’s art, this time in Winter Park benefiting Second Harvest Food Bank. Ono is helming the exhibition from a few floors above the sidewalk at The Dakota, the Manhattan apartment building where Lennon was last seen alive.

John Lennon didn’t believe in coincidences, Ono said. But he did believe in destiny.

“There’s nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be. ...” Lennon penned famously in his solo hit “All You Need is Love.”

He died 40 years after his 1940 birthdate. “It was his fate,” she said. In two weeks she’ll be celebrating her birthday, exactly twice that age.

After a few more fateful anecdotes, she pauses for a moment, her mind walking backward to a decade and a half before she first met the would-be Beatle.

“There was a drawing he made; John is on horseback and there’s another person very much like me on horseback with him,” she said. “He did that drawing on Feb. 18, 1952. He didn’t know me and didn’t know it was my birthday. It’s very interesting. In 1952 I did a crayon drawing called “Invisible Flowers,” and I had somebody named Johnny in there, and I didn’t know a Johnny at the time.”

She didn’t know it at the time, but fate, she said, had already intervened.

Though he’s still seen as a Beatle first in history, he was an artist just like her, Ono said. He would struggle to be seen as one for years, while Ono gained fame and infamy for her own works, at one point famously sitting still in a chair while an audience — in a wild twist on performance art — cut her clothes off, piece by piece.

They had worked apart as artists for years until meeting in late 1966. Though the stories of their meeting differ a bit depending on who you ask, the resultant marriage led fans to malign her influence for destroying a band, though that’s been denied by ex-Beatle Paul McCartney. Lennon called her a muse.

The Artwork of John Lennon will be available for viewing and purchase from noon to 8 p.m. Feb. 1, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Feb. 2, and 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Feb. 3 at 520 S. Park Ave. in Winter Park. A suggested donation of $2 will benefit Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida.

She’d watch him draw on a quiet morning in their apartment at The Dakota, but she said she wouldn’t interfere.

“I was there making tea or something while he was enjoying it,” she said. “I know what artists are like. You don’t tell them what to do. You encourage them. John was very astute about it.”

He also had a tendency to call her over to watch him crumple up drawings and throw them away. When he did that anywhere public, she said, those doodles had a knack for showing up in art galleries.

“The ones that went into the trashcan sometimes if someone was in that room … I saw some things in an auction house and said, ‘where did you get that?’ Somebody was in the room and went into the trash.”

By the time this paper hits newsstands, the drawings Lennon and Ono saved will be finding new temporary homes in a makeshift art gallery on Park Avenue.

Curator Rudy Siegel said he’s always loved bringing the show to Winter Park. This is the fourth time the exhibition has been to the city in the past 10 years.

“It’s always been a really friendly place for us,” he said. “There seems to be a lot of Lennon fans that congregate around Winter Park. They keep asking us to come back.”

Mayor Ken Bradley said he’s happy to welcome the show back again.

“It kind of solidifies Winter Park’s role as a cultural center,” Bradley said. “It’s very exciting.”

And it’s another fateful moment for Lennon. Fifty years to the day of the launch of the first-ever Beatles concert tour, Lennon’s art will have a new moment in the spotlight, on the walls of the former location of fair trade boutique store Bajalia, transforming it into a charity gallery and rekindling a spirit at once.

“People, when they go see it, they have smiles on their faces,” Ono said. “If we can touch their soul, even if it’s just two minutes … I think we need that now.”