Gordon Lightfoot
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 . . .
Lightfoot
Acrylic on MDF, 17 x 26 inches (2009)
Please do not reproduce the images in this display.
Contact Douglas Laing Arts & Letters for further information.
P.O. Box 659, Winchester, Ontario. K0C 2K0 613-774-5180
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