What's a partially color blind musician to do for a living?
Find someone you trust to take you clothes shopping, then become a best selling artist, of course!
Owen Garratt was born in Regina, Canada in 1968 and has very quickly become a best selling artist - while remaining a well kept secret. Over fifteen hundred corporations across the United States and Canada - including BMW, Cargill, ReMax, Cummins, CNR, Hertz, GE Capitol, H&R Block, Merrill Lynch, Owens-Corning and the R.C.M.P. have purchased his work, and his art can be found in collections around the world.
As Owen likes to put it; he's "...completely unencumbered by formal instruction" and his art is strictly black and white.
"I didn't realise that I was 'color-impaired' until I was 19, when I tried to join the Naval Reserve as a summer job. Surprise! I'm not totally color blind, but if it's not a real vibrant, primary color, all I get is mud. So unless I wanted a career painting Amazonian tree frogs, it was pencil for me!"
In addition to being a World Class artist, Owen is a former full time freelance drummer, an avid bookworm and writer, an intrepid adventurer, a great outdoors loving, husband, father and all round Good Joe.
Oddly enough, he's not the wild-haired, tie-dyed, over-emoting, flaky artist type; he's a red meat eating, clean shaven, six-foot guy next door.
"I drew a lot as a kid but as I hit my teens, I got into music, sports, and all of the other teenage hair-raisers. I didn't quit drawing; I just never got around to it. When I was 27, I drew a tiger for a Christmas present, and it was a big hit. An argument with a girlfriend who thought it stunk was the spark that got me to take it up seriously. I was stung into proving that I could do art, and I sold over 900 prints of my very next drawing, which is a little is puzzling, because those first drawings were so bad they nearly hung themselves!"