BC Business
By Myles Murchson
April 1, 2008
Diane Farris
 The LCD monitor displays image after image of the street: barriers, cranes, trucks, closures, jackhammers, workmen.
“Look at this guy,” says Diane Farris, 65, proprietor of Vancouver’s Diane Farris Gallery, the woman whose imprimatur has launched a thousand canvases, the chatelaine of Gallery Row clacking at the keyboard, “He hated me.”
On the monitor, the guy in the hardhat is caught turning, glowering.
“I’d follow him,” Farris says gleefully. “He’d say, ‘Stop that. You can’t take my picture.’ I’d say, ‘Yes, I can. Would you please get your men to stop parking in front of my gallery!’ Guys across the street on the balcony would give me the finger. My staff would ask me to go home. It was a nightmare.”
The worst year of Farris’s life began in the spring of 2000, when an upscale seniors’ condominium started construction on West Seventh Avenue across the street from her gallery.
It’s clear after spending even a little time with Farris that her temperament has more in common with the artists she manages than it does, say, with her accountant. She is all drama, strung as tightly as a Stradivarius. She becomes obsessive about the computer images. When I manage to distract her from the monitor, she fidgets; the lapel mic ends up in her lap and she taps a paper clip on her glass-top desk. As she recounts her story – eloquently, with wit and self-revelation – it’s also clear Farris approached the chaos without a plan. She didn’t even realize she needed a plan. She depended on what had worked in the past: her high-octane personality and network of friends and associates.
What she discovered is that too often friends and customers turn away from other people’s messes and that intensity itself isn’t always enough. Only when she stopped flailing and acquiesced to the best and most timely counsel did she find resolution.
From the outset, Farris understood the construction on West Seventh would be disruptive, but it quickly got out of hand. The agreement was that there would be no construction on Saturdays, but the company simply broke the law, paid the fine, and the crew parked in all the available spots on the avenue. When the construction hit bedrock, they brought in the hydraulic impact hammers. Because of the telephone poles in the back lane, cranes blocked the street for months. “It would have cost a hundred thousand dollars to bury them,” Farris learned later about the poles. “Hell, I would have paid for it. I lost more than twice that.”
For a year, West Seventh was either closed, partially closed or its sidewalk was restricted, with potential customers warned off by “No Parking” signs.
“I’d get calls from people in their limousines coming in from the airport, flying in from France or Texas, people we had worked with for their homes at Whistler over the years. They’d say, ‘We can’t get in there. We’ll try to get in on our way back,’” Farris remembers. “But, of course, you get settled in Whistler, you’re not going to come in again.”
She looks away from the screen. “It makes me hyperventilate.”
West Seventh wasn’t her only problem. Five blocks away, her gracious suite across from Granville Island and the sailboats harboured at False Creek had its skylight ripped out and replaced with plywood. The condo was leaking, and her renovators had found black mould in the walls which, as Farris says, “started to explain why I was having these hideous pneumonia sessions.”
She started living with friends. She stayed in a friend’s computer room at UBC for seven months. Farris has a dog. Her friend had two cats. The animals did not cohabitate well. She lived in another friend’s bedroom for a month. She house-sat another friend’s home.
Fortunately, her mother in West Vancouver adored the dog and was very supportive, and Farris went at least twice a week to visit. Then the worst thing of all happened: her mother died.
Farris was devastated. Their mother-daughter relationship had evolved into a long, deeply felt, loving friendship, and without her mother Farris felt the abyss in her life widening. She tried to pull herself together, at least long enough to give her mother’s eulogy.
On the day of the funeral, Farris went home to her apartment. Where the skylight once was, a workman’s leg hung down through the ceiling. Farris said to him, “I’m sorry. I have to get dressed for my mother’s funeral. All my black clothes are here. Look the other way. I don’t have time to hide.”
The worse life got, the more certain customers and friends avoided her. “I was probably quite emotional at times because pressure was severe, and I am an emotional person,” she says of her discovery that “you’re not as popular when things aren’t going so well.”
To keep her life in perspective, Farris would wake in the morning – in whatever home she found herself – and force herself to be grateful, thinking, “Oh, thank you, Lord, that I don’t live in Baghdad. Thank you nobody is planting IEDs on my driveway.”
Her charity passion is WISH (wishvancouver.net), a society that attempts to increase the health, safety and well-being of women working in the sex trade in the Downtown Eastside. Farris says, “When I really got bent out of shape about my situation, I’d go down there on Monday nights to serve dinner.”
Meanwhile the gallery was bleeding money. Farris lived on the telephone and the Internet. “That’s where the sales came from,” she says. To scrape by, she had to crack into her RRSPs and sell art she had personally collected. And her landlord would not let her out of her lease or “give me any consideration whatsoever.”
It was friends who came to her rescue. Several invited her to dinner regularly just as others had offered places to live. They gave her opportunities to debrief, and one friend changed everything.
Farris bumped into Martin Zlotnik and his wife, Penny, at a party. Zlotnik is a lawyer, former Vancouver park commissioner, former high-profile commercial real estate agent and now an associate at ZLC Financial Group.
Making party small talk, Zlotnik casually asked Farris how she was doing. “Hanging in by the skin of my teeth,” she answered. When he asked what was wrong, Farris burst into tears. “I’m trapped,” she cried. “I just don’t know what to do.”
Zlotnik calmed her down and told her he would come by and look into the problem. When he saw her books, he told her she had to get out of the lease. He also understood she was in no emotional condition to deal with her landlords and told her he’d come along to a meeting with them.
At the meeting, Farris says, “I started to get so upset. There were certain things done by my landlord that really incensed me.” She blurted out detail after detail of past injustices. “And Marty said, ‘You know what? I think you should go away and let me deal with this.’”
After Zlotnik terminated the lease, it was his idea that she relocate her gallery across the street into the main-floor commercial space of the new building that had caused all the trouble to begin with. Who says the age of irony is dead?
Friends rushed in again. Zlotnik negotiated a new lease and a line of credit to maintain it. An architect friend fast-tracked the new gallery’s interior design and construction. More friends helped Farris physically move from her former 6,800-square-foot concrete bunker across the street to her airy, but smaller, 1,200-square-foot galerie intime.
The LCD monitor off, Farris now leans back in her office chair beside a hanging carpet-sized canvas from Attila Richard Lukacs’s famous Of Monkeys and Men series, an ornate Dale Chihuly blown-glass vase on her desk, her worst years behind her, and she counts her blessings.
Not so long ago, she attended a rally for the merchants whose businesses have been traumatized by the construction of the Canada Line along Cambie Street. “I know what they’re going through,” Farris says.
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