biffmitchell.blog: Iverson

I first met Iverson at a flea market over a decade ago. My marriage had just broken up and I was on the move again … with over 30 boxes of books that I’d packed moved and unpacked every year or two for what seemed like most of my life. It was time to unload.

Besides, I needed the money.

So I set up a stand at the Fredericton Flea Market and started selling quality books at ridiculously low prices. Turns out, some may have been collector’s items. Oh well, sometimes life is poop smoke.

I had a couple of boxes of art books for sale and on the first day, in the first hour, a lean young man and his mother came to my stand and started rummaging through them. The mother mentioned that her son was an artist and his name was Iverson and, though I’d never heard of him before that day, from that day on, I started hearing a lot about him, especially doing neat things like creating a painting in public in the basement of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery. He even took time out to talk to the kids and answer their questions about art.

His paintings are expressionist, dark, and sometimes very very big. One of those very very big ones was in the stairwell (a very very wide stairwell) in the Incutech Building on the UNB Campus when I was working for a start-up IT company. It was on a landing at the top of the stairwell sitting on the floor leaning against the wall. Sometimes it was face to the wall, sometimes facing out, sometimes leaning against the other wall.

It was a dark painting, and many of the people who passed by it didn’t like it. And nobody seemed to know what to do with it. It was sort of like having art around, and sort of like having luggage around when you’re staying home. A couple of years later, the company I worked for moved to a new building. By then, the Iverson painting was in the stairwell on the second floor. I guess the good thing about that was that more people would see it.

Iverson died recently. He was in his early forties. He had brain cancer. At least a dozen people mentioned to me that he’d died. Considering that I’m not really a member of the local art scene, this would indicate that a lot of people were telling a lot of people about his death.

His passing was something important, a shift in people’s lives, a noticeable hole in the fabric of things. And rightly so, he was a nice guy.

Ingrid Mueller, The Princess of Art, herself, paid tribute to Iverson at her gallery Art + Concepts. She even invited his friends and family along to talk about him and what he meant to their lives. That was last Thursday. It was a packed gallery. More packed than I’ve ever seen any gallery. Here’s what it looked like …