According to Roger Klein, if you can't take a joke, piss on ya. Life is just too short to get all grumpy about humour, and art is too personable to stick its nose in the air. So when he was informed he had been selected as one of the artists for The Alphabet Project, he was pleased, but when he heard he had been assigned the letter P, he started to giggle. That's when he whipped out his...felt marker.
Klein is an artist who can do landscapes, florals or portraits if he so chose, but he gets just as much joy and satisfaction from quick sketches and whimsical scribblings. It took him a nanosecond to translate P into pee in his chuckling brain, and he knew he would have a memorable contribution to the art series. The dog addressing the fire hydrant was soon born.
Don't take his visual joke to mean he doesn't take the concept seriously, however.
"I'm saving every one of those articles as they come out each week in the paper. It's a really interesting thing to collect," he said.
He's proud he gets to be among the 25 other artists from across the region who were selected to take part. The Alphabet Project is a 100th anniversary initiative of the Prince George Citizen in partnership with the Community Arts Council. A different artist is featured each week taking their turn at one of the letters of the alphabet.
"It's really showing people what kind of artists we have out there," said Klein. "There are so many good ones around, so this shows them off."
Flip through the below slideshow to view the Alphabet Project art and a link to each artist story:
Klein is well known in the Prince George area, but not for art. His family name is synonymous with trucks, graders, loaders, hardhats and work boots. Their medium was wood, stone and dirt. Klein & Sons is a longstanding construction firm now in its fourth generation of operation. Underneath the blue collar is the rest of the paint palette. Klein is a lifelong artist who never likes to let much time go by without taking a new course or trying out a new medium.
"My grandfather, Edgar Colter, always encouraged me," Klein said. "He'd have the community come over to his house in Salmon Arm to do art with him. I lived right next door so I was seeing all this and he was always getting me to try things out. And my mother Constance Klein, she was related to June Carter so the arts was really a big part of that side of my family, and I still have paintings hanging in my place that my mother did."
He has his own painting, a portrait he did of a school principal in his youth, hanging up at the school in Enderby, he said, so he knows well how it feels to create something that other people value. He donates pieces to organizations like Ducks Unlimited and the Prince George Construction Association for raffles and other fundraisers. The Railway & Forestry Museum and Studio 2880 have sometimes displayed his work, and it was the staff at Studio 2880 who alerted Klein to the Alphabet Project.
"My latest thing is chainsaw carving," he said. The local champion of that brand of art is John Rogers and at the mention of his name Klein lights up like a 100-watt bulb.
"John Rogers worked for me. His first-ever bear was done in my shop. Between him and I, we experimented with the torch to blacken the wood with fire. And I have one of his first ones at my home, still. So yeah, that's exactly how I picked it up."
Klein is still active with the company his father started 50-plus years ago, the company Klein left his banking job to come be part of. Now his grandkids are taking on management positions and raising his two great-grandkids. Now that Klein is back to working bankers' hours instead of all-out civil construction/company owner hours, he gets to spend more time with family, and more time focusing on his art.
"I tell everyone at work all the time: you have to tell jokes, you have to laugh, you have to have fun," he said. The work of life is hard, so art - including humour - is there to tickle the parts that get strained and calloused. When things get too serious, you have to take the piss out of it.
