I just heard about Norm Darwish passing on to that great, eternal art show in the sky.
He was Connie's husband. They were notables on the art circuit during the "Golden Age of Art Festivals."
I thought I would raise a great glass to him and write some kind remembrances.
I know a lot of you are relatively new to our game. I can't blame you because you don't know about some of the "notables" on the circuit back in the late 70's, thru the glorious 80's and even into the ending 90's.
So I thought I would give ya a little history lesson with some fond memories thrown in about them.
And Norm, and Connie, were solidly in that mix.
In 1978, I was just a brash new face on the circuit. Fresh back from Hawaii, where I was in the Army and also started doing my first art shows there.
So, from my naive perspective, I thought if you could smoke good Hawaiian pakalolo all day (Mary Jane), suck down Olympia beers and make $300 a day at a show--you were a hot shit.
So I came back to Florida and started doing my 36-shows-a-year thing. Basically, I was grinding it out, barely making a paycheck, and trying to get something cohesive going in my body of work.
In 1983, I got into my first big art show--Winter Park. It was a whole other world I had never been a part of.
I remember walking down the sidewalk and going by the fried dough booth. At 11 AM they already had dollar bills stacked sky-high in their booth.
A little further down I ran into this booth filled with hand-tinted black and white photos. Some were comical, some were almost obscene, some were very romantic. They were all entrancing.
There was this cohesive vision of soft, luminous light permeating through every figure in every image. It was a world I had never seen before.
And sitting on a chair was this enigmatic person with piercing silver eyes and he was wearing a headband, not like a hippie, but more like some mystical creature from the far east.
It was Norm Darwish.
Beside him was this bab-a-licious, comely blonde, his wife, Connie Mettler.
Right away I thought, "Lucky guy. Some day I want to grow up just like him and have a beauty like that beside me."
Norm did not suffer fools well. Maybe a better way of putting it, is that if he wasn't really interested in talking to you, he would ignore you. He would be almost pretending that he was deaf.
And that is how he reacted to me the first time I met him.
Hell, maybe it was because I was wearing hot pink Converse sneakers and wearing an Aloha shirt filled with pink flamingos. Maybe my eyes looked a little too happy, maybe stoned, and I had this big shit-eating grin on my face.
I was smitten--with his work.
I said to myself, "Now that is a cohesive body of work--and so is his wife."
I walked on and saw some of the other biggies of that era at this show. There were the Brunos, whose son Chris is now a biggie on the circuit. There were Jim and Robin Wallace, there was Bill Coleman and trusty sidekick, Carl. There was Emerson with his radiant smile. There was Alan Klug.
These guys all got into the big shows on a regular basis. They made mucho moola. It was the Golden Age of Art Shows and if you had a cohesive body of work and got into the big shows--you made serious money.
Back then, the Florida shows dominated the scene for top ten shows. You had the Grove, you had Las Olas Museum show, you had Winter Park, even Gasparilla.
You could catch a good buzz off the residue from hundred dollar bills back the. It was the Miami Vice era, and the vice was everywhere.
So, I first saw Norm there.
As years progressed, I would run into him three to fours times a year. Sometimes we were both grinding it out, trying to make a paycheck at the second tier shows.
I never was able to have long conversation with him. He would look right through me with those intense Lebanese eyes and say a few words and then be gone. He never smiled at me.
But I loved his work. he had a great command of symmetry and light with just the right colors thrown in. He was a maverick, like me, he went his own way and found a way to make it successful.
One of the funniest things I ever got to do to Norm happened at the Crosby Gardens show in Toledo.
At that time I was doing a humorous body of work that include penguins and flamingos.
I had bought four life-sized plastic penguins at Fast Buck Freddies in Key West. I even gave them names. Glen, Ben, Swen and Ed. I also had my flock of plastic flamingos.
So at the show, while Norm was off somewhere from his booth, I set up the penguins and flamingos all around the front of his booth, and took and old "Best of Show" ribbon I had and put it on the front of his booth.
When he came back to his booth and saw all this, he did not even crack a smile. He clearly was not amused by it. I loved it of course and laughed my ass off.
After that, he talked even less to me. If I got five words out of him, instead of ten, I was doing good.
I kept admiring him through the rest of years and got to be good friends with Connie.
So I am raising a toast to him now. There are not many more left on the circuit from that Golden era, but they should be remembered. They paved the way for a lot of the success that this business has provided.
Aloha, Norm.
September 26 & 27
