Portland hotel exhibits 70 John Lennon drawings

PORTLAND – The music of the Beatles is unmistakable, but John Lennon’s artwork remains unknown even to some of his most ardent fans.

Some of Lennon’s devotees, and others who missed out on Beatlemania, came to Portland’s Eastland Park Hotel over the weekend for an exhibition of his drawings.

“In My Life: The Artwork of John Lennon,” featuring 70 pieces of Lennon’s art, ran Friday through Sunday.

The exhibit was organized more than 10 years ago by Yoko Ono, Lennon’s widow. Ono said from New York last week that she’d had trouble persuading art museums to promote it.

“There’s a certain snobbery about it in the art world,” she said.

One reason art professionals may look down on the exhibit is that Ono, an artist herself, has added color to many of Lennon’s drawings.

All the images – six originals, all the rest reproductions – were created between 1968 and 1980, the year the 40-year-old Lennon was shot to death in New York City.

“People love to come and see John Lennon’s stuff,” said Keith Hutchison, the show’s co-producer. “We’ve had a really good turnout, one of our best so far.”

Angel Rausa, 46, of Brunswick grew up on The Beatles. On Saturday, she came to the exhibit to see another side of Lennon.

“I saw him as a rock star,” she said. “But it seems he did a lot of his painting for his son Sean. I hadn’t thought of him as a dad.”

But the show attracted more than just baby boomers who watched Lennon perform on “The Ed Sullivan Show” or in “A Hard Day’s Night.”

Jacob Cox, 30, of Biddeford came to see what the famous musician could do with a pen and brush.

Dick Swarts, 73, of Peaks Island said Lennon’s work reminded him of James Thurber, once a cartoonist for The New Yorker.

Colleen Graves, 44, a watercolorist from Cape Elizabeth, was not overly impressed by Lennon’s drawings.

“Some of his artwork is very expressive, but some very simplistic,” she said. “Probably if he didn’t have notoriety as a musician, he wouldn’t have notoriety as an artist.”

Hutchison said the show’s centerpiece is an original Lennon pen drawing titled “All We Need Is Love.”

Another famous Beatles song, of course, is “Can’t Buy Me Love.” But in this case, love doesn’t come cheap – the drawing’s price tag is $22,000.