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I LOVE YOU HAPPY FACE
Fri, 17 Mar 2000 From: "Higashizawa, Satomi"

Dear Mr. Pete Dako

Hello. My name is Satomi. I'm a Japanese student who visited at Zsa Zsa on last last Thursday. Thank you for answering my questions. I wrote a report about you, and I got good mark for it. My English is not perfect, but I wrote what I thought. Thank you! -Satomi

I visited Pete Dako's exhibition titled I Love You Happy face, showing at ZSA ZSA 962 Queen st. w. Toronto from March 4 to 25.

According to Gary Michael Dault, Pete Dako is a Toronto cartoonist, illustrator, designer, photographer, publisher and painter. On this exhibition, I saw his imaginative and intuitive works overflowed from his mind. They are drawn onto small canvases, circular saw blades and vinyl LP records. When I visited at ZSA ZSA, Dako was talking with somebody on the phone near the window.

He started to draw on his sketchbook when I was taking notes. While he was talking with somebody on the phone, his hand still didn't stop as if his brain is in his hand. He was talking with his brain, and he was drawing with his other brain in his hands. Gary Michael Dault describes about him and his works:

"Drawn from the fervent doodles he makes every hour of his waking life (and especially while on the phone), these discs of his milling, close-packed figures are pleasingly omni-directional. Freed by their maker from any restrictive up-downness or left-rightness, they are loosed into a kind of swarming, chattering generalized consciousness".

He draws and draws as if he breathes: ghosts, skeletons, birds, cats, dogs, mice, horses, fish. Half of them, I don't even recognize what they are. They look like animals: a cat with a bill, a cat with wings, a fish with legs, a dog with three eyes. Basically, each image is a simple line drawing, but it has subtle charming shape.

Also the combinations of colors are novel and impressive: the crowded golden line drawings on blue background, the orange-colored line drawings on yellow background, white and red on green, black and orange on white. I told Dako that I liked a white ghost on red-colored canvas.

"It disappears, right?" Dako said. The disappearance of the ghost depends on the directions. I understood why he chose the "ghost".

Furthermore, there are Dako's small books for sale (two dollars each). They are also very interesting. When I was looking at the crowded drawings carefully, I noticed that they were not normal crowded drawings. I found a girl's face, but it was man's body at the same time. After I found this, I noticed that many images could be another images. Dako is doing this very intuitively.

As I wrote, his works are very imaginative and intuitive. The idea that he drew onto saw blades and vinyl LP is very novel. "The saw-blade works seem especially fine, cutting-edge paintings in diamond-hard, jewel bright enamels of little Dako beings" Dault writes. I shouldn't overlook what he does next.

Satomi Higashizawa, Centennial College
course: Contemporary Art History with Margaret Rogers