My friend Liz Vaughn is much like her paintings: elegant, charming, witty, colorful, and both her and her work would—I imagine —be equally at home on London’s Carnaby Street in the Swinging Sixties, or in a chic club in Los Angeles today.

A solo exhibition of new oil on canvas works, entitled “Closer To The Heart,” opened Sunday in the Little Gallery at DeGrazia’s Gallery in the Sun at 6300 North Swan. Not surprisingly, the popular painter attracted a non-stop flow of art aficionados including Bohemia Artisans Emporium owner Tana Kelch, Rocking J Leather owner Ronald James, while Tucson’s own The Tryst turned up to play a live music set. When I left at 1:30 pm, four of the new works had already sold (one of them to me) and that’s not bad for the first half of the first day. What recession?

Liz Vaughn with new work "Origin" at DeGrazia Gallery

Liz’s work focuses on whimsical female portraits that remind me, in the best possible way, of a slightly more cubist Marie Laurencin and a more playful Georges Braque—those being two of my all-time favorite painters, so it is not a bit surprising that I always find Liz’s work alluring.

After a year or so of experimenting with larger, expressionist figures, Liz has recently returned to the cleaner, more colorful style of her earlier work, but with added elements of collage, including partially hidden instructions on how to operate toasters and other appliances. These mechanical elements that seem to comment on the drudgery of day-to-day chores contrast strongly with her brightly-colored and somewhat wistful female subjects.

I first met Liz some years ago, when she was part of an outdoor arts and crafts show at a garden center on Tucson’s east side. I was on my way to visit another friend and artist, silversmith Lisa Marie Morrison of Sirocco Design, who was exhibiting at the same event. On the way over I called to see if Lisa needed anything. “I’m set up next to the fabulous Liz Vaughn,” Lisa replied. “Bring champagne!” I did, along with four plastic champagne flutes, and after popping the cork and toasting the warm and perfect day, I thought it the ideal way in which to begin a happy relationship with Liz’s work.

The intimate Little Gallery is the perfect place in which to view these new paintings as its blue and ochre walls gently complement Liz’s palette, and the gallery itself is a quiet and contemplate venue, far from the bustle of downtown Tucson. Follow your viewing with a walk around the beautiful grounds and buildings which were the life’s work of famed artist Ettore DeGrazia. He constructed his first adobe studio there in 1944 and continued to refine and expand the site until his death in 1982. Gallery in the Sun is a marvelous oasis of art, history, and introspection.

“Closer To The Heart” by Liz Vaughn continues daily from 10 AM to 4 PM, through November 18. Admission is free. For more information call (520) 299 9191 or visit www.degrazia.org or www.lizvaughn.com

Text and photographs © by Geoffrey Notkin. Paintings © by Liz Vaughn.
All rights reserved. No reproduction without written permission.

If I were to tell you that one of my best friends died yesterday I would feel I was exaggerating somewhat, because the sad truth is I had not been in touch with Tony for some years. We never had any kind of a fight, or a falling out, but I tend to get wrapped up in the things that are right in front of my face, such as making a television show, writing blogs, conducting business, and publishing books. The squeaky wheel gets the oil, you might say. Or that could just be a lame excuse for not taking care of the things that truly matter, such as sending an occasional email to an old friend whom I knew to be, at times, a bit lonely.

Tony and I were both huge fans of Patrick McGoohan’s legendary television show, The Prisoner, and it was at a Prisoner convention that we first met. Some of you might think: “How geeky!” but that is just because you don’t know any better. Much of The Prisoner was filmed in and around the idyllic private village/hotel of Portmeirion in North Wales. It was the life’s work of the groundbreaking Welsh architect Sir Clough Williams-Ellis, who was a pioneer of planned communities, an early voice for conservation and the National Trust, and a saviour of spectacular architecture. During the middle part of the Twentieth Century, Clough purchased, received, and rescued numerous pieces of beautiful, important, or whimsical architecture—ranging from a statue of Atlas to an entire town hall—and resurrected them among the quiet trees and rhododendrons of Portmeirion. Noel Coward was a fan of the place and wrote his masterpiece, Blithe Spirit, there. McGoohan filmed a few episodes of his earlier TV series Danger Man (known as Secret Agent in the US) at Portmeirion, and then used it as the primary location for The Prisoner, which just added to the latter’s mysterious and moody atmosphere.

Portmeirion is a site of architectural and historical importance, which means it is preserved almost exactly as it was when The Prisoner was filmed there in the late 1960s. As a result, fans going to a Prisoner convention can dress up in costume, recreate favorite scenes from the show, and generally immerse themselves in the magical place where it all happened. It would be like Star Wars fans being able to hold a convention on the planet Tatooine.

I met Tony Reeve at Portmeirion in the 1980s. I was walking up to the Town Hall (which doubled as a pub) one evening, and noticed some friends talking to a very tall fellow. At the time, I was working in the comics industry and one of my pals said: “Hey Geoff, did you know that Tony here is a cartoonist?” I asked him to tell me more but he politely declined several times, gently insisting that I could not possibly have heard of his work. I pressed back, gently as well, until he admitted that he drew a little strip called P-Nuts which was a parody of The Prisoner executed in a vaguely Charles Schultz-like style. It was one of my favorite strips of the era and when I bellowed something like: “You’re THE Tony Reeve!” he looked a bit shy, and was convinced someone had put me up to the whole thing as a prank. And Tony was a little shy at times. He was also overly tall, and quite boney, in a sort of Joey Ramone way. He had a really big chin and a pockmarked face, and I guess nobody could ever claim that he was handsome in a conventional way, but he was very striking, had a heart of gold, was brilliant, extremely funny, and made fun of his awkward body in a way that endeared him even more to his friends. As if that wasn’t enough, poor old Tony had a bad heart, terrible eyesight, and other health problems, which he tended to make fun of, rather than complain about.

Since the year 2000, my trips back to the London of my youth have become infrequent. My mom died, my brother moved to the States, and my father relocated to Ireland. I lost touch with most of the guys I had grown up with, but Tony remained one of only two close friends that I’d make a special effort to see whenever I returned to London. Tony loved cinema, art, science fiction, comics, and could always be counted on to go with me, at short notice, to a new and off-the-wall art exhibition, or the opening of the latest Cronenberg film. Tony came to visit me in the States as well, and he was equally entertaining on either side of the Atlantic—a quietly irreverent intellectual of the first order.

Tony was best known as a political cartoonist and worked for Private Eye, Punch, and The Spectator in the UK. I think The Independent published his work too. He was interested in everything and was one of the few people in my entire life with whom I could talk for hours without getting bored. He kept up with politics (as a satirical cartoonist I suppose he had to) and had plenty of opinions about what was wrong with the British Government, the way in which London was managed, and the arts scene, and he didn’t mind sharing those opinions in a humorous, sophisticated, and vaguely anti-establisment manner, which is just one of many reasons why we got along so well. All of which demands an answer to the question: Why don’t we make time for the things that are really important in life? In the time that I spent messing around on useless Facebook—just this past weekend—I could easily have sent Tony an email, or mailed him a copy of my book, which he would have enjoyed, and would doubtless have found a way to tease me about.

Money was usually a bit tight for Tony, but he managed to make a living doing his artwork, all the while with that terrible eyesight, which I found truly amazing, much like a mechanic running a successful garage with two broken hands. In the 1990s Tony had a pacemaker fitted and he was surprised by how loud it was. “You mean, you can hear it inside your body?” I asked.

“Oh yeah, I had trouble sleeping after they put it in, but you sort of get used to it.”

I suggested that he do an autobiographical comic strip about his experiences called The Ticking Man.

© Tony Reeve

One night I had a vivid dream in which Tony devised an experimental comic series called Mr. Upside-Down. In the strip the layout was as you’d expect it to be, except for the fact that the nutty protagonist walked around the wrong way up, with his feet on the “ceiling” of the cartoon panels, while everyone else was where they should be, according to the unforgiving laws of gravity. It was strange, funny, and absolutely captivating. Well, at least in the dream. When I saw Tony next, in the waking world, I related this story to him and told him he should actually create the strip in real life.

“No, you should do it,” he said. “It’s your kind of thing. But if you do draw it, I ought to get royalties because it was my idea.”

“But it was only your idea in my dream, so it’s still mine.”

“No,” Tony Replied. “Even though I was a figment of your imagination at that moment, I was still based on the real me, so it’s still my idea, even if the idea came from my head, in your dream.” He was joking, of course, but he could always be counted on to debate using existential humor, and so I agreed that if I ever developed Mr. Upside-Down, I would pay him a royalty.

It’s too late for any of that now. Tony died of heart failure yesterday, and—as always seems to be the case with tragic events like these—I was just thinking about him over the weekend. You see, I’m supposed to go back to London in a couple of weeks, on business. It’ll be my first visit in years and I thought how great it would be to get together with Tony again. Maybe revisit the Tate Modern, which was a favorite haunt of ours, or go see some band he’d discovered, or catch a weird indie film that I’d never heard of.

I didn’t even know that Tony had been in hospital for a month. A whole month! He was scheduled for heart surgery, but was fed up with the pain he’d endured as a result of numerous earlier operations, so he declined. They put him on a ton of pain killers and sedatives and he slipped away. And that was Tony. Defiant right up to the end.

I could barely bring myself to look at Tony’s website today, but it is a testament to his sense of humor that the shark cartoon still made me laugh out loud. And so, dear friend Tony, I hereby assign to you, in perpetuity, all rights to Mr. Upside-Down, just in case you want to work on it—you know—some other time. I’m sure it’ll be brilliant.

Be seeing you.

Text and photographs © by Geoffrey Notkin. Illustrations © by Tony Reeve.
All rights reserved. No reproduction without written permission.

Last year’s column about the annual All Souls Procession was one of the most controversial in the history of The Logical Lizard and sparked a spirited debate in which I was accused of being—among other things—elitist. So, we’re going to try and avoid all that this year and only think positive! And in case you imagine that I was, perhaps, criticizing the amazing and wonderful All Souls Procession, please think again and know that was not the case at all. Rather, I was curious and more than a little concerned about what the future might hold for this dazzling and stellar event, as it faces that most terrifying of all propositions for cutting-edge arts events: rapid growth.

Each year I am genuinely amazed when I meet a few Tucsonans who have grown up here and yet never attended All Souls—or worse yet, never even heard of it. Along with the annual gem show in February and the Open Studio tours, All Souls is one of Tucson’s most magical, important and original events. It truly is the night of nights.

As has already been well documented, our fabulous November parade was the brainchild of local artist Susan Johnson, who conceived All Souls as a Tucson artists’ retrofit of Mexico’s Dia de los Muertos. Ms. Johnson’s initial performance in 1990 honored her late father and—as the years went by—the number of participants grew to staggering proportions. Costumes, masks, glowsticks, floats, burning cauldrons, marching drum circles, and a mind bending end-of-procession pyrotechnic blowout by the mighty Flam Chen are all rolled up into a spooky, brilliant, heart-racing, kid-friendly spectacle which nobody who has any interest in the arts, costumes, fire dancing, or unbridled revelry should ever miss.

Marchers begin to congregate in front of Epic Cafe around 5 pm and the procession begins at 6 pm. Bring a flaming torch, or your pet monster, or maybe a bat with glow-in-the-dark eyes, or even a skeleton in a wheeled coffin, and be amazed by what Tucson’s brightest and wackiest artists have come up with this year. And, for the finale tonight, I gather from my agents that Flam Chen has something special in store for us.

It is the 21st annual Tucson All Souls Procession, so bring out yer dead, and throw ‘em on the cart. Long live All Souls! It makes Halloween look like a tea party.

All photographs by Geoffrey Notkin © Geoffrey Notkin. All rights reserved. No reproduction without written permission.