Victor's Norval Morrisseau

In 1974, when I was even less polished than I am now,(unbelievable but true) an art store owed me $600 for some promotion work I did for them. The guy couldn't pay. So he asked me to give him time (he went bankrupt) and as a gesture of good faith, he gave me a limited Morrisseau print ( number 32 out of 50 made). I took it home, rather indifferently, as I had no idea who the artist was. At the time (this being the 70's) I was a disco lounge lizard wearing hideous clothes made from various petroleum products. My artistic tastes were not quite into the velvet Elvis genre but not that far away either. But I was enough of a philistine to have the print independently validated by an art buyer and she deemed it to be the real thing, limited edition and all.

It has adorned the prominent wall of every place I have inhabited since. Morrisseau's mystical creatures have watched me progress through my polyester John Revolta period in the 70's, then my insatiable Reacher period, Porsche and all, in the greedy 80s, my mellowing and uncoupling from materialism in the 90's and my scary move into self employment as the new century found me well into middle age.

I never had my Morrisseau appraised. It is only a print after all,and I don't care what it would fetch anyway. Those silent creatures have witnessed much of my adult life, watched me celebrate my petty triumphs with mute patience, seen me through divorce, disease and despair.

That is the value of the print.

Morrisseau suffered from many demons. Addiction of course. A debilitating disease. But in my view, the worst demons were the dealers who sold bogus representations of his work and the managers who paid him daily wine money to turn out paintings with his shaking hands. Hell has a special room for them.
He is free of all of those demons now. He is in the spirit world he so often brushed with his majestic paintings, trying to let us glimpse what he knew..