Weekend Post
One to Watch - July 2000

A flamboyant self promoter, Vancouver artist John Ferrie has been called every galley owner's nightmare, but after 12 years his efforts are paying off.

Entering John Ferrie's 1,800-square-foot studio on Vancouver's east side, one might be forgiven for thinking that 38-year-old painter has made it to the big time.  There are bright-coloured paintings of flowers and fruits spilling from their bowls, row upon row, some stacked against the walls, others hanging on them.  There's an office space, a painting space, a bedroom and a filing cabinet full of prints and postcards of his work.  It looks very much like the studio of a busy, established artist.

Flanked by this two Dalmatians - Keefer and Bandit - Ferrie, in a baseball cap, jeans and construction boots, then describes how he empties the living-room furniture into the parking lot three times a year when he transforms his work-living space into a gallery.  Drag queens dance on the makeshift stage and the other artists who live in the building wander by the hobnob with Ferrie's up-scale clientele - as he puts it, "West Van and Shaughnessy matrons."

A flamboyant self-promoter, he has been called every gallery owner's nightmare - an epithet that makes him proud.  "I've sidestepped that, "he says. by putting his paintings in hair salons, coffee shops and restaurants when Vancouver galleries wouldn't carry his work.  "Often, the artist does more for the gallery then the gallery does for the artist anyway."

This year, after 12 years of painting his heart out, Ferrie's grassroots efforts are starting to pay off.  This spring, he was an artist-in-residence at the chateau in France belonging to local gourmet chef Linda Meinhardt.  There, he spent a week painting fruit and topiaries (and before he departed, he left one of his paintings on the wall).  Soon after, he was in New York where he was in a group show at the "Get Real Art Gallery" on Fifth Avenue and sold two of his pieces.  While he was in New York, he picked up a copy of People and saw a picture of Robin Williams wearing a cycling jersey he'd designed for Sugoi, a Vancouver firm that makes cycling and running gear, one quarter of the proceeds of which go to AIDS charities.  And in June, he was invited to Rideau Hall in Ottawa, along with Robert Bateman and Attila Richard Lukacs, for a ceremony honoring the donation of his work to the official residence.  "I feel like I've arrived as a Canadian artist," he says. 

But for all his newfound celebrity, Ferrie continues to work as a waiter at Bridge's restaurant three nights a week to pay this bills.  The bonus: he has met people on the job who have come to his studio the next day and bought his paintings.  "As exciting as my career is becoming," he says, "there's a great big world out there and the bulk of my greatest work is still ahead of me."  

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