Dragon's Eye. Duncan Regehr

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      Girl in the Park OIL 20”x 16” 1973

      I have no idea where the term “falling in love” came from; it may have something to do with swooning. My personal method has been to plunge headlong (and with any luck, buck naked), into the fathomless and dangerous waters of romance.

      At fourteen, I breached the virgin shoreline in the arms of an older woman. I think she was all of eighteen. The event itself was so unremarkable that I cannot even remember her name. With apologies to the lady in question, I must confess that it was also the first time I got drunk. I was so ill from over-imbibing that the morning found me literally hung over the cold steel tracks of the Canadian Pacific Railway, surrounded by puddles of liquid pizza. My recovery took four days. Along with my virginity, I am certain that I lost at least half my brain cells. I had to wait another three years before the real tidal wave hit.

      I first plunged into the true love of Carole May, a magical girl I had known since childhood. I had been attracted to her free spirit since the age of eleven; at seventeen I was enchanted. She was a dark, beautiful ocean in whose depths I submerged my adolescent passion. I could have drowned in her forever, but the swells of ambition washed me ashore, and love was driven out to sea. We were together almost three years before we parted. In that time we also lost our child, which created a lasting rift of guilt and a bond of sadness between us.

      Blood

      Opposite the note pad and your broken glass,

      A certificate of sacrifice, left behind

      To be filed in darkness,

      For the child left behind

      Knows no memory of its blood,

      But our crumpled severance list,

      Now lying in stiffened pools of wax,

      It reminds forever.

      I rearrange the news clippings

      And align your strangled hairbrush

      Overgrown with dead split ends,

      And set the drained bottle

      Beside the ashtray brimming

      With your cremations, embossed

      With your red kisses, my orchestration

      Embalmed with your fallen smoke, I breathe

      And once more search the glass we shared

      For your fingerprints over mine,

      To sense again, any spare element of union

      That might speak to me of genesis.

      But there is no redemption in these vestiges

      No blood to trace amongst these empty shards,

      For grief decants only ritual,

      And seance only conjures the lost.

      -DR

      Pocket (LINE DRAWING SERIES) PEN AND INK 141½”x11½”

      As Stu in Sam Shepard’s Chicago,Vancouver City Stage, Fall 1973, post pneumonia

      Lack of funds, losing the child, and my career obsessions ultimately sank the relationship. I have often looked back with regret, but also with gratitude for the memory of a passion which over the years has frequently been the stimulating force behind a number of paintings.

      My subsequent philandering was both a misguided quest to rediscover the romance of that relationship and a vain attempt to forget the unhappiness of its demise. The following years in Vancouver were wild ones.

      By the spring of 1973, after performing and rehearsing as many as four different stage productions at once, recording radio plays in the morning, partying at night, plunging into various female oceans, and painting — often on no sleep at all — my health and my work fell apart. I came down with pneumonia.

      It seems an obvious revelation, but during a bout of delirium it occurred to me that if I nurtured my physical self, I could work with greater vitality. I decided that I needed a long life in order to produce all the ideas that glowed beneath the surface of my fevered carcass.

      Decadent OIL 24”x18” 1977

      Old Boxer WATERCOLOR 28”x17” 19f

      I rose up from the cold coals of pneumonia a very determined phoenix. Having already set the precedent for the scope of productivity I relished, I set about amending my life by eliminating the parties and at least fifty percent of the oceanic skinny-dipping. I then introduced a vigorous two hour workout that continues as a compulsory daily regimen and an important cornerstone to the focus and energy behind my work.

      I was later to add amateur boxing to my list of physical endeavors. I had always abhorred team sports, preferring the one-on-one (and in this СКАЧАТЬ