Still
Life With June
by
Darren Greer
Novel
220 pages
Hard Cover
7" X 8.5"
ISBN 1896951449
$29.95 CDN
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Available.
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Tyler's
Cape
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Still
Life With June
by
Darren Greer
Excerpt from On Modern Art, Writer's Block and Still Life with June:
In 1995 I checked into a drug and alcohol treatment centre in Ottawa,
where I stayed under supervision and in therapy for eleven months
while I rid myself of a nasty and progressively worsening cocaine
and alcohol addiction. The treatment centre sat in the busy downtown
market, not far from the National Gallery of Canada on Sussex Drive.
On Sunday some of us would go there, because we were bored, and
it was free, and it was something to do on a day when there was
no group therapy and we were going crazy thinking about getting
stoned. When I think back on it, it makes me smile. There we were:
a gang of long-haired, rough-necked addicts, some of whom had been
in prison a good portion of their adult lives, roaming the hushed,
hallowed halls of the gallery, looking at modern art. We chose the
contemporary art rooms because we found it more entertaining than
the portraiture, realism, renaissance and religious art of the previous
centuries. We preferred the iconoclastic if obscure geometric art
of Piet Mondrian, the neon installations of Don Flavin, the crazily
indistinct modern sculpture of Alberto Gioccometti to yet another
painting of Christ on the Cross or as baby in mother's arms. We
laughed at some of the stuff we saw, I remembered, scoffed at others,
and rarely admitted to liking anything. In those early days of our
treatment, our insides still as raw and unsophisticated and as colourfully
and emotionally charged as the canvases of the late abstract expressionist
Mark Rothko, we were careful not to say anything that might expose
us to ridicule. |
