The art that accompanies this blog post is the work of Colin Smith. I now have some very cool original artwork on one of my walls. It makes me very happy.
The story begins in 1977 when I’m a frustrated grade 11 clarinet player. I desperately want to be in my school’s concert band, but clarinet players are a dime a dozen and I know it will be a little while before a spot opens up for me. I notice there are two empty places for bassoon players.
It looks like a cross between a smokestack and a tree. For those who know their musical instruments, it’s a woodwind and uses a double reed. It looks a little like something Dr. Seuss might’ve designed. You blow into the end of a snaky steel pipe that sticks out from the trunk, and its quirky sound comes out of the top. It sounds … rich, growly, full of character, even ethereal. In movies and on TV, you often hear it when a piece of music is meant to convey something funny. It’s notoriously difficult to play and sometimes referred to as the “clown of the orchestra.” I know nothing of this. It’s simply love at first hear. All I have to do is read music in the bass clef and learn the new fingering. I work hard and six months later I’m in the band.
My career as a bassoonist was short-lived, but I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for the quirky instrument. Fast-forward 40 years to 2017. I was an avid reader of a section in the Telegraph Journal called Salon. There was a weekly cartoon I enjoyed by Colin Smith, bright and colourful with a wry twist that appealed to my dark sense of humour. Suddenly, the cartoons started breaking out in bassoons! They were hilarious and I had to have them, so I made arrangements to buy the original drawings for two of my favourites: Queen Elizabeth Repels the Bassoon Armada, 1587; and the Bassoon Underground. Four years later I finally got around to framing them.
I like the first because the expression on the Queen’s face is priceless. “Talk to the hand,” she commands. The artist seems to specialize in drawing the faces of exasperated women. And the second is hilarious to think about bassoon players as a subversive element plotting to take over the world. And, not even counterculture people can make the bassoon cool.
If I were a millennial, I would get a tattoo of a bassoon on a part of my body I wouldn’t mind showing to strangers. I can’t imagine where that might be. In other words, turn my body into a living canvas to showcase meaningful objects and events in my life. Fortunately, I came of age in the 70s, so I buy original art and safely hang it on my wall, rather than drill it into my skin where it could sag into oblivion.