Lightfoot

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Lightfoot

Gordon Lightfoot
Acrylic on MDF, 17 x 26 inches (2009)

One of a series of paintings about singers and players ...

It is dificult to say too much about this fellow. Some think of him as an icon, and better still, a Canadian icon. That undersells this fellow quite a bit I think.

Mr. Lightfoot is a product of the sixties, much in the same way as Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Ian and Sylvia. They were considered folkies but they have demostrated much more. Whether Lightfoot started out on Country Hoedown or not, he has earned his stripes as one of the finest song writers and musicians who ever graced a concert stage, or filled shelves with their long playing records.

I saw Lightfoot once at the Guelph arena in 1970. I sat on the concrete floor, perhaps 20 feet away from him and Red Shea on guitar and John Stockfish on bass. There he was, a little tipsy, forgetting the words now and then, hitting his craeer stride and soaking in the excesses of the times and the profession. It didn't matter: it was a thrill to be sharing the same space with these people.

True to most musical careers (and tides) they ebb and they flow. However, I don't think the places in our hearts we found for Lightfoot in 1964 were ever filled with anything else. I stopped buying his records in the late early seventies as time and circumstance broadened my musical tastes and I could no longer afford the records of them all!

The portrait shows Lightfoot in recent days, sporting a 12-string Gibson guitar he seems to have had from the beginning. A man of many gifts, who thought enough of us to share some of them . . .


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