|
 John Dolan, 43, who used to sell his sketches for pocket
change and now gets 3,000 to 4,000 pounds ($6,800) for them,
said he had descended into a life of poverty, drugs, crime and
homelessness until a homeless woman got George, then a puppy, in
exchange for the price of a can of beer and gave the dog to
Dolan.
He started drawing the dog and the scenes around him while
begging on the street, and soon passersby were buying his
sketches, he said.
"The drawings that I do of him are quite simple but I've done
one that's been in most of the papers, it's the very detailed
one, it's quite a big drawing," Dolan said, while sitting in his
favorite spot on an east London street.
He can now afford his own lodgings but still prefers to draw
outdoors.
"I've captured him magnificently in that, but these little ones
that I do, I basically try and capture his personality if I can
in all of them," he said.
His success in part comes from a chance meeting with Richard
Howard-Griffin, who runs street art tours in East London, owns a
gallery there and mounted a first show of Dolan's work.
That was a hit, so now there is a second "John and George".
"I mean, John's rise has been really meteoric in the art world,
it's like watching an artist's career in fast-forward - that's
what a lot of artists say so his first show was a sell-out, he's
got a second show now coming out which is really, really
amazing," Howard-Griffin said.
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"He's got a book and he's doing a show in Los Angeles and all this
kind of stuff so there's a real relevance to his work and there's a
real soul in it because it has a true story behind it which is very
inspiring, and that's born out of the work when you look at it."
After spending three years on the streets churning out sketch after
sketch of George, Dolan is branching out with the show in Los
Angeles, and also plans to make a book of drawings of rock stars
with their dogs in conjunction with a dog shelter.
But he will never stray far from his four-legged friend, about whom
he's also written a book, "John and George: The Dog Who Changed my
Life".
"He was quite an aggressive dog and he would growl at you and he was
a cat chaser and he was weary of people and when I started training
him, within a month of me starting to train him, basically his
personality began to change," Dolan said.
"He became a really pleasant dog."
(Additional reporting by Rollo Ross; Editing by Michael Roddy and
Jermey Gaunt)
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