REMEMBERING THE INCOMPARABLE DAVE REGNIER
Father, friend to the arts community will be missed
A three-piece band illuminated by dusky blue projector light, a well-dressed crowd gathered as Edmonton’s Faunts took to the stage. To say the least, it was an unusual and difficult Friday night gig for them at the cavernous hall at Centennial Park. The bar was buzzing and crowded, full of sorrow — but more so with love.
We were all saying goodbye, you see, to our beloved party bear, Dave Regnier, who died a week earlier surrounded by his family — including his wife, Christine Frost, and their young kids, Sophie and Henry.
Once, playing a ghost wearing glasses in a Wet Secrets video, I’d never heard so many gonzo stories about a person in such a short time, including about Regnier’s leap from a helicopter, partying with Dan Aykroyd and (separately) David Suzuki — and, of course, his propensity to buy huge armloads of fireworks.
Instead of shooting them into the sky — how pedestrian — Regnier passed them out and started not-quite-safe sparkling skirmishes that looked set by some bridge in the movie Apocalypse Now. After long days volunteering his time, muscle and magnetic good will, the carpenter started these full-on-laughter wars more than once among us as we built the infrastructure for Golden West Music Fest in days that now seem long ago.
His fireworks were also involved when he met so many of his lifelong friends at Young Life, and their testimonies at his funeral were many and moving, saluting his character, innovation and loyalty. The man was truly a luminous spark of life.
A couple of months back, after a close-call accident at his construction company, Regnier, 40, was diagnosed with a grim and unrelated prognosis. He soon texted his siblings, “I’m a-comin’ for your marrow!”
Odds well against him, his heart was heavy and focused as he prepared for the worst — all he could think about was his young family. Even so, he kept his spirits up, for example hoping to commission a T-shirt from an illustrator friend reading, referring to his health troubles, “I’ve got a lot on my platelets.” That’s just the tiniest glimpse of that magical brain.
Still, looking to take his mind off this un-asked-for burden, even for just one night, on May 3 Regnier, his brother and a friend went on a motorcycle ride around the city. After they’d stopped to take some happy photos, cruising along Saskatchewan Drive at the edge of U of A, Regnier’s bike suddenly stopped — it may have been the kickstand — and before everything was still again, that was his last moment of consciousness. He’d suffered severe brain trauma, and was gone a week later.
Regnier met his wife-to-be at a Faunts show years before all this, and as the band played their dreamy electro pop last weekend, there was both a sense of a circle closing, but also of infinity rolling off into the artificial sky blue behind them. This was not a good scene, and yet it was the best of scenes, and there we were still alive while Regnier was somehow not dancing among us, the missing guest who was everywhere.
This is important: if you’re able and interested, you can help his family out online by looking up his name on gofundme.com. There’s also a fundraiser — Rolling for Dave — starting at 5 p.m. at Plaza Bowl (10418 118 Ave.) Friday.
Outside of that, if there’s any chance you can be generous and loving and funny in your own life — maybe especially that last one, even in the most dire of situations — know that it does make an impact that lives on, the kind of difference our friend made for so many.
With the bold shapes and attention-grabbing colours in his delicious abstract paintings, Jonathan Forrest’s colour Coherence art show opens at Peter Robertson Gallery, 12323 104 Ave., at 7 p.m. Thursday, where he’ll be in attendance.
Forrest, who’s lived in Canada since 1977, is originally from Edinburgh. He now splits his time between Vancouver Island and his old church studio in rural Saskatchewan, so it’s appropriate he’d drop in between the two here in Edmonton.
In an interview on his website, he notes of the paint he uses: “For some reason, I guess because I started painting in the late ’70s, early ’80s, it was a time in abstraction — I think in painting, generally — there was a big interest and emphasis on the physicality of paint. When I was finishing up in university, they came out with the first thick acrylic gel. It hit the scene, just when I was becoming a painter.”
He says, “It kind of made sense to me. From then till now, I’ve kind of had this thing about paint.”
These artworks are clearly best seen in person, but if you can’t make the opening — which features jazz by Peter Robertson Gallery’s resident jazzman Jerrold Dubyk — it’s up through Saturday, June 9.
Odds well against him, his heart was heavy and focused as he prepared for the worst — all he could think about was his young family.