Gerry Porter was a talented visual artist, designer, and humorist who made an indelible impact on the St. John’s arts scene.
He died in 2016, and on Sunday December 1st, a website of his work is being launched at The LSPU Hall, from 4 pm to 6 pm.
The website contains hundreds of Gerry’s cartoons, comics, posters, memes, and for his on-line followers, an archive of his twitter feed and news haikus.
Can you tell us a little about yourself? Born and raised in Freshwater/Placentia; left home at 17 to go to university; at 20 I entered an art gallery for the…
You can find such surprising and funny things while digging through archives. The Pilote de Terre-Neuve, published in 1869, is full of dollhouse-like illustrations of Newfoundland’s coastline, complete with tiny ships and houses. I also came across a sea captain’s letter to his daughter, in which he describes “seven little gulls recently hatched” that he is attempting to raise.
Joey sits in soft focus. Behind him, blue skies and bright murals paint a backdrop easily mistaken as exotic. Festival flags rally. Paving stones undulate drunkenly up the lane. Streetlamps, tagged out to the sun, sleep off their graveyard shifts. A canopy of shadows waves like a palm tree.