The Citizen, 2015-02-19, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2015. PAGE 5.
I’ve long harboured an unnatural loathing
for Walter Keane. Never even met
the man but I put him right down there with
other pop cultural potholes like Disco,
Hallmark cards, Don Cherry’s blazers
and the squawky-voiced CBC Radio promo
dork.
You don’t know Walter Keane? Sure
you do. He’s the guy who polluted our visual
space with those wretched paintings of saucer-
eyed waifs back in the 1960s. Inexplicably,
those paintings of children – with eyeballs so
big and moist the kids looked like extra-
terrestrials – sold like hotcakes. Not in high-
end art galleries for sure, but just about
everywhere else. And I use the term
‘paintings’ loosely. They were posters really,
cheaply produced and run off in the
hundreds of thousands. Walter Keane was a
slicker businessman than he was an artist.
He discovered that an awful lot of people
would pay good money for dreck. “They
don’t care if they’re getting an original,”
he gloated. “They just want something they
like.”
And Walter Keane filled that void – with
posters, postcards – even refrigerator magnets,
all festooned with kids whose eyes were on
permanent high-beam.
Well, actually...he didn’t.
Provide the original artwork, I mean. It was
Keane’s wife, Margaret who did the actual
painting. Walter just marketed them and
pocketed the profits. The only kind of ‘artist’
Walter was, was ‘con’.
What’s more, he kept his wife Margaret
in the dark, almost literally. She was
confined to a tiny art studio in their home
where she churned out the paintings in a
miasma of turpentine fumes. Keane
convinced her that there was no market for
what he called ‘Lady Art’, so he made sure that
she painted his name, not hers, on the
originals.
Not to put it too finely, Walter Keane
was a bully and a crook. As time went on and
demand increased, Keane became increasing
abusive, insisting on more and more ‘product’
from an already traumatized Margaret.
But wait...there’s a Hollywood ending.
Against all odds, Margaret, accompanied
by her daughter, escapes the clutches of
Walter and fled to Hawaii where, eventually,
the scales fall from her normal-sized eyes and
she realizes she’s been cheated and
defrauded by her mate to the tune of millions
of dollars.
She finds a lawyer and she sues. They
end up in court in a landmark case called
Keane vs. Keane. Walter, who by now thinks
he is invincible, represents himself,
browbeating Margaret, belittling witnesses
and boasting of his painting prowess and
expertise. He insists that he, not Margaret, is
the artist who produced the paintings in
question.
The judge looks at them both and, Solomon-
like, announces “I’m giving both of you a
canvas, some paint and a brush. You have one
hour to produce a painting”.
Margaret duly turns out yet another waif
with eyes the size of hockey-pucks and
Walter....Busted! Margaret wins; Walter goes
down for fraud and slander.
Frank Zappa said “Art is what you can get
away with.”
Maybe so. But bad art? That’s something
Walter Keane couldn’t get away with.
Arthur
Black
Shawn
Loughlin
Shawn’s Sense
The true key to happiness isn’t money, as
much as some folks may want to
believe, but in finding a way to do
something you enjoy and having it pay the
bills.
Sure, I’m a bit young (or at least I hope I’m
a bit young, every day I’m staring down a
slightly shorter barrel towards my 30th
birthday), but I truly believe that if you’re
doing what you enjoy and it’s paying the
majority of your bills, you can go to bed with
a smile on your face and wake up with that
same smile.
There are a lot of people these days taking to
the internet or striking to complain that they
don’t feel they’re getting paid enough for what
they do. Most recently an old friend of mine
shared a story about a non-tenured, non-full-
time teacher complaining about making
$23/hour (or $34,000) a year.
All I could think, reading through the article,
was how the person said he wasn’t happy
because he couldn’t, with the time for which
he got paid, review every one of his 200
students’s exam with each of them because he
only gets paid $6,700 for 255 hours and, in
actuality, already works 280 hours.
To me, the solution seems simple; if you feel
strongly enough about something, it shouldn’t
matter if you’re getting paid or not. Meet with
the students, talk to them. Otherwise, take your
internet whining down and find yourself a new
job.
Maybe my advanced case of impatience-
caused-by-aging is flaring up again, but I just
don’t have the time or the patience for people
who hope that complaining on the internet will
solve their problems.
If you’re not getting paid what you think is a
fair wage and the love of the job isn’t enough
to make the wage worthwhile, well then the
solution is simple: find another job.
Okay, finding another job isn’t simple, I
know that, but whining on the internet is likely
the very last thing that’s going to solve your
problem.
Take advantage of the grants available for re-
training or see if you can make some kind of
horizontal shift or, take some of that precious
downtime and invest in yourself by reading,
studying or taking courses to advance yourself.
I know I’ve said this before, but I guess some
people didn’t get the message: Don’t take a job
to get rich unless being rich is enough to make
you happy.
I’m willing to bet that most people would
rather make a modest wage and love and
believe in their work than get rich toiling in
obscurity.
Back to the part-time professor: He points
out that he is well-respected by his students,
earning a relatively high score on his student
reviews. He also points out that those reviews
are far from a perfect barometer of professor
performance.
However, if I were in his shoes, making $24
an hour even considering the fact he works
more than he is supposed to and obviously
being appreciated by the people he is teaching,
I would have to believe that would be enough.
He points out that the average household
income in Canada is $76,000, which he
doesn’t even earn half of and because of that...
You know what, I’m going to stop telling
you what he’s saying and just let you read it
yourself: “My family is officially classed as
“poor” by Statistics Canada, and we get
provincial income assistance. For this paltry
sum [$34,000], I work all year round, with a
break of a week over Christmas. By the time
one course finishes, another has already
started. I get no pension from my employer,
although I have worked there for over four
years.”
I honestly had to re-read the above
paragraph a few times. I mean, $75,000 is a lot
of money to be making annually as a couple in
my experience. I know, for some of my friends
(lawyers, teachers, etc.), it may not seem so
out there but, once I pay off my student debt,
my student loans, my car loans... once I’m
debt-free except for my mortgage, I’ll be able
to live pretty comfortably on half that.
Also, provincial income assistance? Where
do people sign up for that? Because I’m sure a
lot of families around here make less than
$75,000 a household.
I guess my biggest gripe with this entire
thing is that the people we see striking and
complaining are usually from the public sector
and usually (pay attention there to the two uses
of the word usually) making more than a lot of
the people whose support they’re asking for.
We all see the Sunshine List, we all know
that working for the government, be it at the
county level, the provincial level or the federal
level, very often pays a lot more than the same
jobs in the private sector.
Take offense to what I’m saying here if you
must, but the simple fact of the matter is, if you
can pay your bills and you enjoy what you’re
doing there is no reason to seek more and more
money aside from making sure you’re getting
more than your neighbours. If you can’t pay
your bills, however, then you need to find
another job, not expect to get paid more for
what you do.
If you can pay your bills and you find you
still want more, then there’s something else
wrong with your life and you need to address
that, not the bottom line of your paycheque.
Realize that, for every group that strikes, for
every raise the Ontario Provincial Police get,
for every 14 per cent increase in wage at the
county level and for every bump in salary at a
university or college, someone else has to pick
up the slack.
Taxpayers in Huron see tax hikes to cover
wage increases, taxpayers in municipalities are
already seeing hikes to cover the new OPP
billing model and already-poor post-secondary
students have to come up with even more
money (or pay student loans into their 30s) and
eventually that all comes full circle.
If you don’t like your job, or if you feel it
doesn’t pay enough, find a new job. Don’t turn
to others and try and convince them to
sympathize with your problem, look at
yourself and realize that you need to do
something different.
After all, odds are if you’re not happy with
what you make for what you do, there’s likely
someone out there who would love to take
your place.
Denny
Scott
Denny’s Den
The new developers
Just as a new board at the Huron County
level has been established, I’m worried
that its volunteer members are already in
the process of being overworked.
There’s no denying that the Huron County
Economic Development Board is a great idea –
at least to me. I think it’s a great idea. I realize
there are some who turn their noses up at the
very notion of economic development, but I
have seen it in action and think it’s a good
thing.
I am especially supportive of the kind of
economic development on which this board
will focusing its efforts. Economic
development through the newly-formed board
will be driven by private industry and its local
leaders. These people, who know a thing or
two about business, will be doing their best to
attract other businesses to Huron County. This
is a far cry from alternative approaches to
economic development which can focus on
main street benches and wall-sized murals.
However, I found myself getting a little
worried at the Feb. 11 meeting of Huron
County Council when two big ticket grant
requests ($284,600 from Blyth’s Emergency
Services Training Centre and $261,000 from
HealthKick Huron) were sent to the board for
its input.
These suggestions were made by Treasurer
Michael Blumhagen and don’t get me wrong, I
don’t think the move was a bad one, I just
wonder if this shift of preliminary
responsibility (the final say does still sit with
Huron County Council) will be one that
becomes more and more common as the years
go on.
Chief Administrative Officer Brenda
Orchard may have caught on to this, telling
councillors not to waste the board’s time. She
said if council had no intention of supporting
the two aforementioned projects, to just say
no, rather than sending them to the Economic
Development Board for something to do.
I fear that sending things to the board might
become akin to asking your elementary school
teacher for an extension on your Independent
Study Unit. Sure, you tell her you’re sick, but
in reality, you haven’t even chosen a topic.
I feel that the Economic Development Board
is capable of doing some great things in this
community and I’d hate to see it become a
parking lot where councillors store things for a
month or two while they make up their minds.
Again, I’m not suggesting that this is what’s
happening. It’s just that after what I’ve seen in
the short weeks since the board has officially
become established, it seems like a lot of work
has made its way to the board members. And
there are no signs suggesting that will change.
You can make the case that all kinds of
requests or issues are related to economic
development. In fact, I’m surprised the
$20,000 request from the United Way Social
Research and Planning Council for its
Community Trends project wasn’t sent to the
board as well. The project aims to collect data
useful for grant applications – something that
fits in very comfortably under the header of
economic development.
These brilliant business minds have agreed
to volunteer their time, effort and talent to a
bold new approach to economic development.
It was billed as an out-of-the-box concept that
will do very important work in Huron County
in the coming years and decades.
Councillors need to make sure they see the
board for what it is, and what it can be, and
that they’re truly seeking board input, not
using it as a filing cabinet for decisions they’re
not yet prepared to make.
Other Views
Quit your griping and whining
It takes a keane eye …