During a tour of Francis X. Donovan’s pop-up gallery, “Lost Cat,” a passerby assumed the makeshift exhibition space off Fairhaven’s McKenzie Alley was already open to the public and started perusing the vast array of paintings and sculptures on display.
Donovan, 79, didn’t stop the man from checking out the art. Instead, he patiently answered the visitor’s questions, confirmed he was indeed the one responsible for creating all of the pieces jam-packing the large room, and invited the guy to a Friday, May 5, opening reception.
And because so much of what Donovan is displaying has an interesting backstory, he also shared a few with the accidental arts patron. One tale focused on a standing sculpture of a bull fashioned out of an antique wooden butcher block with handlebars for horns and electric stove burners on the floor underneath its ropy tail representing “cow pies.”
“I’ve hauled this across the country five times,” Donovan said, adding he got it from a friend in Boston — the city where he was born and grew up. “It’s 294 pounds. I like to have children experience it. I have them sit (on it) and pretend they’re riding it.”
When the man queried if he’d gone to art school somewhere, Donovan slowly shook his head.
“No, I’m self-taught,” he said. “Life has been my school.”
Later, Donovan reflected on the fact that he’s been making art for more than 40 years and said he thinks it’s helping keep him alive. He doesn’t create with the intention of other people liking what he makes or purchasing the works, so it gives him the freedom to do what he wants.
“It’s all stuff from experiences in my life, my imagination, unconscious, conscious,” he said. “Hopefully I can share it and some people, if they do like it, will spend some money.”
Ten percent of every sale from the monthlong show will be donated to the buyers’ charity of choice, Donovan said, noting once again he’s not in it for the cash. (In fact, if you’re a wealthy art collector with an agenda, he’s likely to tell you what you’re after isn’t for sale.)
Although arthritis in his hands has made it nearly impossible for Donovan to sculpt with wood anymore, he’s still able to prolifically paint at his downtown Bellingham studio in a shipyard building he said owners have been threatening to tear down for years. For now, most of what was filling his studio is in the pop-up gallery up the stairs from Cafe Blue, where it will remain at least through the end of May. What isn’t on the walls or in the sculpture “village” is stacked in a back room. Art can even be found in the bathroom.
On the bigger walls where paintings are displayed, it’s clear Donovan doesn’t follow an agenda. A painting of Grand Steeple-Chase horses throwing off their jockeys — made to protest the cruelty of the race, which often sees horses being killed after breaking their legs while jumping over one of many fences — shares space with a painting of what appears to be an asteroid. Also on the wall are a work where Donovan transferred people’s faces from his phone onto canvas and painted over; a couple of more abstract paintings; and pieces utilizing old lace tablecloths and curtains he finds at yard sales and thrift stores, many of them hand-crocheted.
Of course, even those have stories. Going back to his childhood, Donovan said he grew up in an Irish ghetto — “a shanty, it was called” — in a cold-water flat without heat. His father was a longshoreman and his uncles were policemen who moved to the suburbs and married girls from out of the neighborhood who put up lace curtains in their windows.
“And they looked down their noses at us who were still in the shanty,” Donovan said. “So that’s what started it.”
Other than one large group piece in “Lost Cat” that was made about 15 years ago by Donovan and a number of fellow painters who used to congregate on Thursday nights to create shared works “without ego,” what viewers will see on display is a large part of Donovan’s life story.
The subject matter varies in his works, but whether they’re focusing on the vagaries of politics, personal stories about loss and love, Albert Einstein, his grandchildren, made-up terrorists, global warming or nature, they all have something to say.
“My stuff’s all different because I’m self-taught and I just paint what I feel,” Donovan said. “I don’t make wallpaper.”
Attend an opening reception for “Lost Cat” from 5–8 p.m. Friday, May 5. The pop-up gallery can be visited from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursdays through Sundays through at least May 31 in McKenzie Alley, up the stairs from Cafe Blue, 1319 11th St.
