No, really. Pockets, a white-capped capuchin monkey, was born in British Columbia, Canada, and lived as a pet. But as his owner’s health was failing, she found him difficult to care for, so she looked for a solution. She found the Story Book Farm Primate Sanctuary near Sunderland, Ontario, and flew with him there, staying a week to help Pockets get used to his new home. She continued to keep in touch to check in on him.
“Pockets will take advantage of any mistake that a human might make,” his bio notes, “so his enclosure has to be well secured — if he can figure out how to open the door, he will. He loves to play, especially playing ball and painting.”
Wait, what? Story Book volunteer Charmaine Quinn was charmed by Pockets’ white hair. “He looked a bit like Andy Warhol with that wild, white hair,” she said, so she gave him a surname: Warhol. That, in turn, prompted her to give him a children’s paint set to play with — and he loved them. Within a couple of years, Pocket had turned out quite a few paintings, and Story Book put on an exhibition of 40 of them at a restaurant to raise money to help build a new barn at the farm. Art collectors went “bananas” for them, the Toronto Star wrote, bringing as much as $300 per piece from buyers as far away as Europe.
Publicity from that caused prices to rise. They continued to sell about as fast as Pockets could paint them, which was not necessarily very fast. “He’s easily distracted,” Quinn said, “and he has the attention span of a 3-year-old.” Or, as the sanctuary’s Executive Director Daina Liepa put it, “We always had to make it a quiet zone for him, for the artist to work.” Still, Pockets’ output helped put a big dent in Story Book’s campaign for a new building. (To contribute, the sanctuary can be contacted via their web site.)
In April 2012, Quinn and fellow sanctuary volunteer Izzy Hirji presented Jane Goodall with a photo of, and a painting by, Pockets for her birthday at the Jane Goodall Institute in Toronto. Attention from other celebrities has led to interesting donations, such as a guitar from Ricky Gervais. That sold for US$4,150, and the buyer circulated it for signatures by others, such as Brian May, Peter Frampton, Will Ferrell, Bryan Cranston, Dhani Harrison, Ricky Warwick, and Steve Cutts. Then it was auctioned off again. Those proceeds were split between Story Book Farm and Brian May’s Save Me animal welfare organization.
In all, Pockets’ work brought the sanctuary around $200,000 toward operational expenses and the building fund, Liepa said. “He was such a character. He was immediately likeable and everybody just loved to be around him.” She says capuchin monkeys in the wild live 15–25 years; Pockets, who had recently suffered a stroke, died on March 2, at 33.