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America to Russia, India to Tahiti, Fylde artist Jerry Gordon has sacrificed
a lot to follow his dream.
Just over ten years ago he gave up his job, sold his house, car and his possessions, packed a rucksack and headed out around the globe to capture on canvas 40 of the most revered spiritual buildings in the world. He has spent the last decade yo-yoing between temporary jobs and an exhausting painting schedule to complete his 'Harmony arid Diversity: Millennium Project’. He estimates the cost of the project (including loss of earnings) amounts to somewhere close to the quarter of a million pound mark. But Jerry says: ‘1 may have lost out materially, but I don’t regret a minute of it’ His paintings, which include studies of the Sikh Temple at Amritsar, the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, St Peter's in Rome, the Pyramids in Egypt, London's Westminster Abbey (which will celebrate its own Millennium in the year 2000), Liverpool's Anglican Cathedral, the Vatican and India's Taj Mahal, have gained him the reputation of one of Britain's greatest greatest project painters. Yet his reasons for starting out on the project stem from more modest roots. |
Although Jerry is not a religious
person, he has an awareness of ‘something other,’ a positive guiding force.
When he has chosen to ignore it, things invariably have gone wrong but
when he has been aligned with it, he has been empowered, gifted, even blessed.
This is one of the forces that led him to start this monster project back
in 1986.
He also wanted to contribute to achieving world harmony in the new Millennium: ‘Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, whatever the monument these are beautiful buildings. I wanted to bring them all together in one exhibition for the year 2000’. In all his paintings he has incorporated the moon as a unifiary symbol: ‘It represents eternal time and being unaffected by differences.’ Since 1986, Jerry has visited around 45 countries and has completed
32 paintings.
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If he hadn't stopped for a
shoeshine, he would have been at the exact spot where the bomb went off.
He now believes that shoeshine boy was his ‘guardian angel.’
Another scary moment was when an armed Mujahedin rebel approached him as he was sketching in Springier, Kashmir. ‘There was a great deal of tension there at the time, Shrinigar was under siege. A curfew had been imposed and, as night fell you could hear gunfire from the Old City, and see tracer bullets burn across the sky. Westerners had been kidnapped and were being held hostage so, when this guy ran up to me, I thought, "This is it." But his luck held. The man asked him to deliver a message to President Clinton and the Prime Minister explaining the plight of the Kashmiris. And in the former Soviet Union, painting St Basil's in Red Square, the KGB wanted to know what he was doing travelling alone in his orange VW Beetle. However, in India, he met the Dalai Lama, revered as a spiritual leader across the globe. It was moments like this which inspired him to continue. He is now on the final leg and the deadline is fast approaching. Jerry still has eight paintings to complete which will cover Mexico and Bali. |
He is also planning a national
tour in 1999 of his six feet by four feet canvasses for the Millennium.
Venues will include London, Blackpool, Liverpool, Lancaster, Oxford and
Preston with Jerry hoping to finalize another four before the end of the
year.
‘I never envisaged it would take off like it has done, the project has just grown from a desire to do it.’ ‘Ideally I would prefer to keep the paintings together as a collection which completes the whole story but I may have to sell them individually to finance my next project.’ Jerry won't give too much away yet except that it is going to be even more ambitious than this one. And as for returning to Lancashire, Jerry says he remains true to his roots and misses his home on the Fylde. When he has completed his work he looks forward to returning and settling down close to Fleetwood, where he was born. But in the meantime, he is going to continue chasing his dream. click the 'back' tab on your browser or click here to go
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