YOKO ONO PUTS JOHN´S ART UP FOR SALE IN STAMFORD EXHIBIT BENEFITS FOOD BANK OF LOWER FAIRFIELD COUNTY

John Lennon was constantly drawing. "Even when lawyers were having special meetings and he had to be in there, he would be drawing," Yoko Ono said in a phone interview from New York. "Those meetings were very boring, and he would be doing these beautiful drawings."

In fact, he drew so much that Ono jokes about it. "He would make something he liked and say 'Hey, Yoko, look at this,' and I would say 'yeah, yeah'"

Ono, Lennon's widow and the official keeper of the Lennon flame, is the sponsor of an exhibit this weekend in Stamford, "So This is Christmas: The Artwork of John Lennon." The Lennon show will benefit Food Bank of Lower Fairfield County, which provides food to non-profit organizations in Darien, Greenwich, New Canaan, Norwalk, Stamford and Wilton. (It will not benefit from the sales of the works, but from the donations collected at the door. Admission is free, but a $2 donation is requested.)

The show will exhibit and sell about 100 artworks by the former Beatle. Or, more accurately, by Lennon, with some enhanced by Ono.

"John's drawings were black and white. The color you see in these serigraphs is what I put on," Ono said. "I know there has been controversy about that."

Ono, who has been criticized for altering the artworks, said that she enhanced some with color because she was trying to boost Lennon's stature as a visual artist.

"All of them were black and white, but the people I would go to sell it to said that with no color, they can't put it in the shop window," she said. "At the time, it was very difficult to get John's work in any gallery anywhere. ... So I decided to do it."

Before pursuing a career in music, Lennon was a student at a Liverpool art college. Due to poor academic performance and a snarky attitude, he was thrown out before graduating.

Ono said that all his life, he was proud of having gone to art school. He was not influenced by anyone, she said, but he admired surrealist Rene Magritte.

"He liked that he looked like this little accountant, but he was a great artist at the same time," she said.

He wasn't influenced by Ono either, even thought she is an artist. She said that when she first saw his visual arts work, she was impressed.

"After I met John but before we started to be friends, I went to a bookshop to check on one of my books. They had put 'Grapefruit' on the shelves. So my name starts with O and his started with L, so his book was very near my book. I was curious and looked at it.

"I did not think I would see anything incredible, but it was so incredible I wanted to cry," she said. "It was so beautiful. It brought both tears and laughter, kind of like a coin on both sides."

Ono, who will not be present at the Stamford exhibit, said that the holiday title of the exhibit is not a reflection of the content of the works, but just of the time of the show. "We all get sentimental about Christmas," she said. The name comes from the lyrics of Lennon's song "Happy Christmas (War is Over)."

Food Banks

Kate Lombardo of the food bank said the recent storm Sandy "really taxed our resources.

"Our agencies ran out of food. We had to replenish the agencies. Then their clients ran out of food. So the agencies had to replenish their clients. It trickled down and now we need to rely on the community more than ever," Lombardo said.

Legacy Productions, the exhibit-staging firm that helps Ono present her series of Lennon shows, also has staged exhibits of artwork by Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, Grace Slick, Jerry Garcia, Janis Joplin and other musical icons.

Rudy Siegel of Legacy said that of late, the charities benefiting the Lennon shows have been hunger-related, to reflect the lyric from Lennon's song "Imagine": "Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can, no need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man, imagine all the people sharing all the world."

Legacy chose the Food Bank of Lower Fairfield County merely by asking people who worked at the hotel where the exhibit will be held if they knew of a local charity.

"Typically, we've been able to collect $3 to $5,000 to give back to some organization locally," Siegel said. "Food banks are good because they're so tangible. They are able to turn a dollar into four dollars of food through their contacts and resources."

"SO THIS IS CHRISTMAS: THE ARTWORK OF JOHN LENNON" will be at Stamford Hilton Hotel, 1 First Stamford Place. (For GPS, use 151 Greenwich Ave.), from Friday, Nov. 30, to Sunday, Dec. 2. Hours are Friday, noon to 8 p.m., Saturday 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., Sunday 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Admission is free, but a $2 donation is requested to benefit the Food Bank of Lower Fairfield County.

That Hippie Penny Lane