Published: August 30, 2008 11:35 am      

VIDEO: Falls artist colors path to healing

To take a video tour of Jonathan Rogers' studio return to the homepage on this Web site and click on the "Strokes of Light" story in the Associated Press Video player.



GALLERY OPENING

WHO: Jonathan Rogers

WHAT: Adults only exhibit

WHEN: 8 p.m. March 28

WHERE: Gateway Gallery, Buffalo.



Jonathan Rogers never did tell. Not in words, anyway.

He choose, instead, to use a paintbrush to fend off the darkness of his childhood, each vibrant stroke a protest against the colorless souls who inflicted their tormented view of the world upon his young heart.

The worst of it is revealed in one of the paintings in his Niagara Falls studio, where three grownups clad in black stand at the foot of a child’s bed, their postures indicating he should not reveal what has just occurred.

Some 70 years later, he will still not describe the trauma he suffered at the hands of a religious cult in Toronto. But it is all there for the world to see in a series of paintings that are ultimately life-affirming as they detail the places a child goes to hide when life is too difficult to bear.

“They said I couldn’t tell. They didn’t say I couldn’t paint pictures,” said Rogers, chuckling softly during an interview in his studio on the fourth floor of the old Niagara Falls High School, in the cultural embrace of a haven for artists called the Niagara Arts and Cultural Center.

When Rogers ran away from home as a young man, he may have expected the events of his youth to disappear like the monsters in a nightmare, but they remained to haunt him in the recesses of his psyche.

These days, he makes his peace with the past in his massive sunlit studio where, with his giant rescue dog Tosca at his side, he toils at the last painting in the series from his youth. The piece shows a young boy jumping jubilantly on a bed, surrounded by a colorful, disintegrating squad of the gremlins of his childhood. If the gremlins look eerily like refugees from some dark alley off Sesame Street, it is only because he spent time there on his jagged path from there to here.

The telling of Rogers’ life is a classic tale of personal redemption, filled with animated heroes, Hollywood clowns and, yes, the sweet front stoops of Sesame Street.

As a child who could draw before he could talk, Rogers said he was a disinterested student. But his portfolio got him into the Ontario College of Art, and “I started to show off,” he recalled. “But everything I did tended to be a little repulsive.”

He ran away and traveled the world, including the Arctic, Middle East and Europe in his travels. After absorbing the work of ancient masters, he returned and began to teach at a small college just outside of Toronto and, for the fun of it, created an experimental film from an oil painting called “Evolu,” which won a nearly a dozen awards worldwide.

“People thought I was the next Walt Disney,” Rogers said, puffing an Indian-made cigarette.

Encouraged by a group of struggling artist friends in Toronto, including a band of comedians from “Second City” who included Gilda Radner and Dan Aykroyd, he made his another animated film, using Radner’s and Aykroyd’s voices for what became a prime-time television feature. The piece, using Radner’s voice as the main character — just around the time she was getting famous on “Saturday Night Live” — was called ‘Witches Night Out” and earned the highest rating of any animated film in NBC’s history. Soon after, winds of change in administration at the TV company blew shut all the doors which had once been open to Rogers.

“So, I did Sesame Street,” he said, “creating little cartoons in Spanish and French.”

From there, the road gets as crazy as an amusement park ride, careening back and forth between homelessness and success, including a stop at Disney producing educational films and time animating a music video called “Atomic Dog” for the Funkadelics. There was also a stint producing cartoons for Marvel Productions that included such popular Saturday morning shows as “G.I. Joe,” “Casper” and “My Little Pony.”

He made “tons of money” before he lost it all trying to create his own cartoon empire in Korea and Malaysia.

“I was totally homeless. That’s when I started to attend 12-step programs. I was going to six or seven groups a day,” he said.

One day he found himself on his knees, trying to decide whether to take his own life.

“Kneeling on the floor,” he said, “holding a gun to my head, I surrendered to a perceived power that I couldn’t comprehend really or understand. I had to learn everything all over again, starting with how to breathe.”

His rebirth was a revelation. Sounds and colors became more alive to him.

“I heard silence for the first time,” he said. “Listening to music became fabulous. The sounds came out of the silence.”

In his return trajectory, there was more bouncing around. He couldn’t get a job in Hollywood. His reputation had been ruined by past behaviors. He couldn’t live in Canada; it was too expensive.

But in the struggling little community of Niagara Falls, he found a measure of peace and comfort surrounded by people who recognize his gift and honor his journey.

Just before Rogers made one last return to Hollywood, he had begun to destroy a major portion of his work, and she paid him all that was left in her checking account to purchase what she could. When he returned, Kudela gave him back the work she had saved.

“I had most of his things intact, and I said, ‘You can have them back,’ ” she remembered. “There was a perfect studio for him on the fourth floor.”

Kudela, an artist herself, called Rogers “a stunning talent.”

“Most of us just skate on the surface differently and often times it is because they’ve had a very difficult life.”

There have been triumphs on the jagged path. Rogers had a major show at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in 2002 and has had two solo shows at the Castellani Art Museum at Niagara University, which purchased one of Rogers works for its permanent international collection in 2003.

The Castellani piece, called “Little Dance,” depicts a child dancing before an audience that is seated on a couch.

“Everyone seems to be drawn to it,” said Michael Beam, curator at the Castellani. “I know he has a lot of dark, heavy undertones in his work, but superficially they're fun to look at. They’re engaging, they’re interesting.”

Beam suggested that looking at four or five of Rogers paintings at one time is the best way to get something out of his work. That will be possible this month, when his work will be exhibited in a adult only show that opens 8 p.m. March 28 at the Gateway Gallery in Buffalo’s Allentown. ?

Rogers’ dreams of someday returning triumphantly to the New York City’s Manhattan galleries. His canvases await, carefully stacked against the walls of his gallery. Rogers pulls a couple of still life portraits from the stacks, reflecting a talent for detail which breathes life into the painted faces.

His own self-portrait, which he started it with the intention of it being thoughtful and reflective, is heart-wrenchingly joyful, a painter holding a brush in gleeful anticipation of what is yet to come.

Rogers turns 71 in April, although he appears a good decade younger. The rest of his life story will hopefully be filled, he said, with painting, drawing and writing.

“One day at a time,” he said, unwilling to retreat from the philosophy that saved him.

His escape from a shadowy black and white world to a sunny studio filled with a rainbow of colors might be all the redemption one man can hope for. In the meantime, he paints, and waits for the world to catch up.

Contact editor Michele DeLuca

at 693-1000, ext. 157.