Monkey that looks like Andy Warhol holds art exhibition

With two hands, two feet, a tail, tongue and furry butt as tools to unleash your artistic wild side, who needs a paintbrush? Not Pockets Warhol, a painting primate whose use of body parts has turned into a lucrative monkey business. Art collectors are going bananas for the clever Canadian capuchin’s colourful abstracts, which fetch up to $300 from buyers as far away as Europe.

Now Pockets — we’ll use his first name to avoid confusion with that other giant of the art world — is having his own show. Following a reception on Tuesday night, 40 monkey masterpieces will hang in Sadie’s Diner and Juice Bar on Adelaide St. W. for the next two months. Pockets created the works during weekly therapy sessions at Story Book Farm sanctuary near Sunderland, where he lives with two dozen primates rescued from research labs, zoos, pet stores and private homes across the country.



But the proceeds from sales of his artwork aren’t going into Pockets’ pockets. He’s raising funds for a new barn to replace the cramped facility an hour northeast of Toronto. It was Pockets’ resemblance to the American pop artist that prompted volunteer Charmaine Quinn to introduce him to non-toxic children’s paint as a way of keeping him busy.

“He looked a bit like Andy Warhol with that wild, white hair,” she says. While Pockets has done his own version of Warhol’s famous Campbell’s soup and Marilyn Monroe images, his splotches, splatters and sweeps of colour are more akin to the work of abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock. “He seems to like bright colours,” says Quinn. “He’s easily distracted and he has the attention span of a 3-year-old,” explains Quinn. When the mood is right, the teenaged monkey takes mere minutes to smear colour on a canvas that will sell for $25 and up.

There's a photo gallery here.