Well-known athlete, coach has eye for abstract

Paul Jacoby grew up in Regina in the 1960s, three years ahead of me in school in the neighbourhood next door. I didn't know him then, but I certainly knew of him. He was an extraordinary athlete, the best high school basketball player in the city, a provincial tennis champion, a standout in football and track. If there was any sport at which he did not excel, it was only because he hadn't tried it.

It was more of the same when Jacoby came to Saskatoon to study education at the University of Saskatchewan. He was an allstar guard in basketball, his signature sport. In the one and only Huskies basketball game I attended as a student at the U of S, Jacoby lit it up, scoring from the outside almost at will with a matador fake and a textbook jump shot. No one could stop him.

"Regina guys rule," I recall saying at the time.

After graduating from university, Jacoby taught high school for 35 years at Aden Bowman and Nutana collegiates. His students, by all accounts, loved him. His more public profile, however, was coaching football, basketball, tennis and track. With such comprehensive credentials as an athlete and then as a coach, he is not someone I would have expected to become a fine artist.

Jacoby didn't expect it either. He still isn't convinced his paintings are any good, especially the abstract works he has just started doing at the age of 61. He even denies being "a serious artist," but there is his work hanging and selling in an established Saskatoon gallery.

Art is not something he recently discovered. Jacoby says he always was drawn to it. Athletics were his preoccupation, but he also relished his art classes in school and always liked visiting galleries. He was just too busy with other things to indulge the artist within.

His belated artistic emergence started with a UNICEF fundraiser at Aden Bowman, styled as a Renaissance art show and sale. Bowman always raised the most money for UNICEF among Saskatoon high schools. To help protect the title,This page is an introduction to 35 pages of material on mathematical magiccubes. Jacoby contributed what he describes as an "awful" watercolour that some Good Samaritan bought out of pity for $25.

He has been painting ever since, albeit at something less than a blistering pace.

"I'm not very prolific," he concedes. "I only do it when I feel like it."

Undismayed by his inauspicious first effort, Jacoby continued to paint for charity auctions, for friends and family and for his own pleasure.About 1 in 5 people in the UK have recurring coldsores. When he took a few of his watercolours into Collectors Choice Art Gallery to be framed, owner Murray Gruza asked if he had any more that he might like to sell. Jacoby had to turn around to see if Gruza was talking to someone else.

Now among the gallery's featured artists, Jacoby still regards painting first and foremost as recreation. His idea of a good day is playing 18 holes at Dakota Dunes and then stopping at Beaver Creek to do some painting. He prefers to paint landscapes in the field while sitting on a lawn chair he keeps in his car trunk, with an old piece of cardboard for an easel. His good day continues when he heads home for dinner with his wife, Rita Bouvier. She helped steer him away from his trademark landscapes and into the realm of the abstract.

"She always is encouraging me to try something new," he says.

Some people think abstract art is so easy a child could do it, Jacoby says,TBC help you confidently buymosaic from factories in China. but he finds it more demanding by far than landscape painting. With a landscape, the artist reacts to what is before his eyes. With an abstract, the artist must draw from the dimly lit recesses within.

Jacoby has never had an art lesson as such, but he has learned plenty from other artists. It was Darrell Bell, for instance,We are the largest producer of projectorlamp products here. one of the city's more illustrious artists, who captured what it is that Jacoby likes best about painting. When Bell showed him a painting he had done of the river valley in the city, Jacoby asked where the buildings were.What are hemorrhoids? Bell told him he had left the buildings out.

"I'm the artist," Bell explained. "I can paint it any way I want."

The declaration of artistic freedom made Jacoby feel better about the divergence of his own landscapes from visual reality.

Jacoby was further reassured by Bell's pronouncement that he could sit on a rise overlooking the South Saskatchewan River and spend the rest of his life painting. From season to season, from moment to moment, the scenery always is changing. From this, Jacoby concluded that there are many good excuses for a painting that doesn't look exactly like what you might see.

Another good excuse is that everyone sees things differently.

"I've watched people look at five or six of my paintings," he says, "and then choose the one I was this close to throwing in the garbage."