COMMUNITY PROFILES A nose for art
By JACQUELINE LEE Special to the Daily Press
He has completed the 24-mile Canadian marathon from Cocagne to Moncton in nine hours, pushing himself backwards in his manual wheelchair. He has published four poetry books, and his award-winning poem, “Happy Birthday, Canada,” is now being used by the Chief Citizenship Court for Canada.
Still, 53-year-old Joseph Gille Legacy is most proud of the fact that he is the only nose painter he knows.
Legacy, who has completed more than 900 paintings since the age of 8, was born with cerebral palsy. For the first 32 years of his life, he was confined to his house and never saw beyond what he could take in from the window of his Bathurst, New Brunswick home. Legacy’s father didn’t want anyone to see him; his parents taking him out once or twice a year to look at Christmas lights under the cover of night.
Legacy didn’t get his first wheelchair until age 22, moving around on his back, learning to count by using the bathroom’s ceiling tiles. He’s never taken an art class, but earned his GED in 1986 at Moncton Community College, where he took classes in creative writing, computer programming and law. Born into a household of eleven children, he is the only one working as an artist, staging workshops for children and encouraging them to paint “any way but normal.”
For the past year, Legacy has lived in Santa Monica with his fiancé, Sandi Glendinning. The two are to be married in Las Vegas next month, marking nine years together. Four days a week the couple ride — Legacy on his wheelchair, Glendinning on her bicycle — to the Third Street Promenade, where Legacy paints and the two sell their homemade cards, paintings and documentary DVDs.
Last week, Legacy (with Glendinning helping to translate) took time out with the Daily Press to discuss a cold upbringing, a resilient resolve and a colorful future that includes Vegas wedding bells.
In your documentary, you said, ‘I cannot be who I am not; I can only be who I am.’ How long did it take you to reach a point where you stop asking yourself, ‘why me?’
Legacy: “I knew this all my life. I realized it and got it the first time I was on my own, going backwards in my chair. I could do it on my own. I can’t do anything about my situation, the way that I am, but I can work with what I’ve got.”
When did Gille start painting? What made him think of using his nose?
Glendinning: “At 8 years old. He couldn’t use his hands and he used to scoot around on his back until he got his wheelchair. He used to do little figurines on the wall. He had to figure it out really quickly, so he just used the nose. Nobody else in Gille’s family is artistic at all. Nobody had that talent in his family. It’s a way for him to express himself.”
WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR INSPIRATION?
Legacy: “I never really know until I’m done. It’s like a drop of water, a tap, and I just let it flow, just start going, wherever it’s going.”
Glendinning: “You can be watching Gille painting and leave for a few seconds and come back, and just when you think he’s doing something, he’ll do something different and it’ll completely change.”
DO YOU STILL HAVE YOUR FIRST PAINTING? WHAT WAS IT?
Legacy: “No, it was a bird. A long one. I did it on the floor, on my side when I was 8. I was moving around a lot easier back then, did larger paintings in the 70s and 80s.”
DO YOU HAVE A FAVORITE?
Glendinning: “There’s a few he wouldn’t sell. That angel. Someone’s trying to buy that one, but he’s trying to hold on to it. That was the first angel he painted. That’s why he likes her. And one of me and Gille.”
WHY DO YOU PAINT ANGELS?
Glendinning: “He painted one for some reason, it was around Christmastime in 2004. He does a lot of birds, angels, sailboats. They’re free. Water, mountains. His father would only allow, once or twice a year, for him to go to the backseat of the car at night to look at the lights. The excitement of those lights are the colors in his work today.”
DO YOU HAVE A FAVORITE COLOR?
Glendinning: “Yellow, red, purple. One time, we were looking at this magnificent sunset over the water in Canada, and I name off maybe six colors, and Gille says, ‘But don’t you see…?’ and he must have named off 25 colors. He sees colors that we don’t see. He just sees, he’s very observant.”
WHAT DID YOU DREAM ABOUT GROWING UP TO BE?
Legacy: “When I was little, I wanted to be a doctor or a radio announcer. I loved the radio and I always pictured myself talking. That’s how I used to learn about life, listening to the radio, paid attention to the news to see what was going on. Now, I listen to KLOS’ Mark and Brian.”
WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THE INTERNET?
Legacy: “It’s a dangerous move. On one hand, it makes people lazy. It makes people powerful. But it is amazing that anything you can think, you can look on the Internet and it’s there. It’s an amazing tool. If you give a child the equipment, they can develop their own mind. I had the time to do it, but not the tools. I taught myself math by lying on my back in the bathroom and counting the tiles on the ceiling. If I had that computer when I was little, I would have been a genius.”
WHY DID YOUR DAD KEEP YOU IN THE HOUSE?
Legacy: “Times and things were different. When you had a child like me, you were a failure in society. It was (my father’s) fault somehow to have a handicapped child, so if he could hide him somehow, then he would-n’t have to deal with it. And they did that to the handicapped children at that time. It’s not like now, where everything is out and in the open. I believe in my heart, there’s still a lot of places in Canada that it still happens.”
DID YOUR DAD EVER SEE YOUR PAINTINGS?
Legacy: “He didn’t think anything of it, never gave me any encouragement. When I wrote my first book, my dad didn’t believe I wrote it, didn’t ever believe I could do anything; never gave me credit for anything.”
Glendinning: “When you know better, and you still have no way out, it’s very frustrating. Even when you know he shouldn’t have that type of control, but you have no power and you can’t get out, you’re just stuck there. That’s what I didn’t understand. Even when his dad passed away and Gille moved out and was gonna go to the wake, his mom said,‘Gille you can’t go, Daddy will get mad.’ And even though he was dead, she was still so scared, never spoke out against him. There was no touching Gille, but he was still very abusive. He drank and was mentally, verbally abusive. None of the brothers or sisters would have anything to do with their dad. Most of the siblings were kicked out by the age of 16. If they didn’t do it his way, they were out of the house. He was really a rough man. And Gille’s mom was so opposite. She was just the most unreal person, an unreal lady. She was a little teeny lady, five feet tall, had all these children. She was Gille’s rock and he was her rock.”
DO YOU REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME YOU WERE OUT OF THE HOUSE?
Glendinning: “The first time Gille went out of his house without his mom was City Hall and they were having a protest. Gille’s a big advocate. He’s written a lot of protest literature and letters to the editor since then.”
When you first went out of the house, did you face any discrimination?
Glendinning: “People would stare. Friends of ours would ask us why we were together. We’re different, but here in Santa Monica, everybody’s different. We’re on the Promenade one day, and this woman comes up to us and she said,‘Are you his sister,’ and I said, ‘No, I’m his wife’ and she asks, ‘Are you sure? How can that be? I mean, sexually. How does he perform sexually?’ So I said that I didn’t know her well enough to answer that type of question, and even if I did know her I might not answer that question. So Gille laughs, cause that’s what he does, and Gille just goes,‘Tell her we do it with bungee cords.’ People stare all the time, and Gille just says, ‘It’s their loss. It’s a missed opportunity for them. Don’t worry about that.’”
WHEN DID YOU START LIVING INDEPENDENT- LY?
Glendinning: “When he was 32 years old, he talked his parents into letting him move to a whole other city, to a brand new rehabilitation center for people with spine injuries or cerebral policy. He would ask, ‘What’s a bank,’ and I would have to tell him that’s where you keep your money. He always saw his mom do that stuff, but he didn’t know what those things were — going to the bank, buying groceries, getting a cup of coffee.”
Legacy: “I remember the first thing I bought. It was an alarm clock and I was so proud of it.”
HOW DO YOU GUYS LIKE LIVING IN SANTA MONICA?
Glendinning: “We love it; we do love it. We didn’t actually plan on living here when we came from Canada. We were gonna live in Orange County. We were originally gonna go down to Laguna Beach and live down there, but we hadn’t arranged for an apartment yet. We were gonna stay with a friend of mine... and got rid of everything we owned. Didn’t sell a thing, just gave everything away to friends and family and whatever, and we packed six suitcases — I think five of them were filled with Gille’s art, which is what we needed to bring. We brought all his paintings, shipped a couple of tubs down, but not much. When we arrived we said, ‘Why rush right down, we’ll stay in Santa Monica overnight.’”
HOW DID YOU AND SANDI MEET?
Glendinning:“We met in Canada in 1997. August will be our ninth anniversary and we’re getting married in Vegas. Our wedding’s going to be at the little place called the Princess Chapel. It’s supposed to be this little church type chapel. I wanted to get married here at the beach, but Gille wanted to get married in Vegas, so we found every reason we could to get married in Vegas. It’ll be my first time in Vegas. The beach I’ve already seen.”
Glendinning: “If you spent an hour or two with Gille, it would take you a while to understand him, but you’ll get it. You just really have to listen because Gille speaks the same all the time.We had a lot of patience. Gille has a lot of perseverance and patience. If he wants you to understand something, he’ll find a way for you to understand it.It’s easier for me if I’m looking at Gille, but I still have problems with certain words, but for the most part we’re okay. But Gille speaks French,that’s his mother tongue in Canada, so that was his first language and the French rolls off his tongue a lot easier. Gille’s very persistent. After we met a couple of years, he started writing his fourth book, ‘The Matchbox,’ and we did a lot of dictating. And that book he typed it; it took him a year and a half to type it. So that helped us. And a lot of talking.Gille and I are never in a hurry,we can’t be.We plan out as best we can so we’re not late, but things just take more time with Gille.”
Legacy: “I can’t believe it. I’m all on my own.”
Glendinning: “Yeah, it’s enough. People come over and buy his paintings, so he sold a few of his big originals too. He had a big show out in the desert in April where he sold a lot. That was in Palm Springs. He sold 35 of his little ones for more than he does on the Promenade and he sold several of his big ones too. Between that and selling his originals, we do well. And donations, a lot of donations, people are very generous here. We go every weekend for sure. We try to work Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. But if we need money, we work more. We work between four to six hours. We’re very lucky. We’ve got a pretty good life. We have everything we need.”
Legacy: “I’m too busy just keeping us surviving. But one of my big dreams is to start a cerebral palsy foundation, a non-profit camp like the place I went one of the first times I left home, to a Rotary camp for handicapped kids. So I want to start Camp Legacy, where kids with handicaps come and learn art.
One of the first times I left my house was to go to the hospital and I always wonder how I could hurt myself so I could go back there. I loved that hospital. I loved it. Everybody knew me; I was there for 10 days. Great bed, good food. I ended up in one of the operating rooms to watch; they had to escort me out. Very curious about everything. What’s behind that door, behind that mountain?”
Glendinning: “Skydiving. We checked into that actually. He loves flying in helicopters. He loves flying.”
Legacy: “Once a month, when rent is due. That’s the only fear I have.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on July 24, 2006. Read the original PDF.