Face Value The Arts of Leonard Cohen by Robert Enright In 2003 Leonard Cohen got up every morning, put on a pot of coffee, lit some incense (since he quit, the closest thing he could get to smoking), went to a table on which there was a small mirror, and executed a self-portrait. After looking closely at the finished work, he annotated it with a single line, or a sequence of lines that responded to the mood suggested by the drawing. He performed this daily ritual for a year and, taken together, the drawings he produced constitute a journal in pictures and words, a sort of visual diary from which emerge a series of Leonard Cohens. Cohen says not a single one of them looks like him and yet they are unmistakably self-portraits, resonant with his characteristic wit (running from the generous to the sardonic), self-deprecation and passionate intensities. The drawings cover a wide range of media from doodles on napkins to watercolours, oil pastels, charcoal drawings and digitally created images. "Just as play is deadly serious for children," he says, "so doodles are deadly serious for me." Cohen is aware of how his visual art functions in the context of his poetry, songwriting and performing; "I think one is relief from the other". He always drew and when his children were growing up (in both Greece and Montreal) the family would often sit around the kitchen table and draw. He has continued the practice for himself but never considered the drawings would be shown in an exhibition. In his poetic introduction for Drawn to Words: Visual Works from 40 Years, called "If there were no paintings", Cohen modestly describes his work as "acceptable decoration"... Please click here for the full text in PDF format.