LISA FITTERMAN Vancouver Sun

GIDEON FLITT SOBBED the first time he saw Salvadr dali's surrealistic paintings,
but he wasn't crying for love of beauty alone. Sure, he was moved by all the melting watches, charging bulls and crucified Jesuses. But Flitt, then 14,was despondent because he felt that the moustachioed, manic Dali had lifted his hallucinatory images straight from the nightmare that was Flitt's own mind. "It was my first time at the Tate Gallery (in London) and I was trying not to cry," Flitt recalls in The Room, his hairdressing salon art studio on West Fourth Avenue, where you can buy paintings for $12,000 or get a one-of-a-kind haircut for a more reasonable $35. "I was embarrassed to cry in front of my girlfriend. Her father led me out of the gallery. He thought it was something about my life, my family, and he was saying 'It'll be okay and I kept sobbing. No-one is going to believe me. I thought of that first. I thought of my images before I saw Dali and now I'll never be able to convince people." "I was," he continues, 'Just f-g destroyed." That's Flitt for you. He is so full of child-like bravado. It's easy to envision him puffing his little chest out and tearfully saying he did it before Dali. It's just as easy to understand that this setback didn't stop him one bit.He's as focused, funny and ambitious as Kim Campbell in male drag with a new wave hair cut.

Today, he cuts hair fourdays a week so he can eat and pay the rent. The rest of the time, he paints what Vancouver Sun art critic Ann Rosenberg has called perfectly renderedneo-Baroque psychodramas. There is nary a melting watch to be found. His is a Mad Hatters world where everything makes sense because he decrees it to be so. Doesn't everybody have a lobster stand with spindly legs like the one he had specially commissioned for his freeze-dried lobster? Well, they should.

Rather than photographs of hairstyles he has created, the walls are hung with his works,so rich and detailed that you' can practically touch the apple of a cheek or the folds of purple velvet and emerald taffeta. Most of them work, with male and female characters who never look at each other or have their eyes closed if they are, with the tools of everyday life used as props, such as 13 irons strung together like a braid of garlic. EVEN WHEN THE paintings dont work on an emotional level - a portrait of a woman gazing off into the distance is just that, flat and meaningless - the execution is near perfect. There are other props in this Room. too. A cheetah's head rests on a cabinet while a fake bronze breastplate, for somebody with excruciatingly large breasts, sits proud on a shelf. Classic toasters from the 1950s, which size 16 (approximately) are perched atop a display of kettles, which Flitt plans yo use in a future painting of a woman waking up in a sea of... you guessed it, sit in the back. A pair of silver plated high heeled shoes, size 16 (approximately) are perched atop a display of kettles of irons. In the back behind the shampoos and robes, is a container of rabbit skin glue that Flitt uses to outline drawings before he sets any paint down. A cello. which he has been playing for nearly a year, rests against one wall. Right now, he is halfway through composing sonatas about the days of the week. Where Vivaldi had his Four Seasons. Flitt has his Days: Sunday, for example, is characteri zed by adagio tempos because it is a day of anticipation and trepidation as one simply waits for it to end so the work week can begin.

Tonight. it is mid-evening by the time Flitt finishes with his last client, librari- Susan Crysler. He settles back in a barber's chair with a pack of smokes and a beer retrieved -from a hiding place outside that keeps the bottles cool. HIS HAIR SPRINGS straight up fromis scalp like curly grass. He is irreverent, and sometimes shocking, because  he says that helps to blunt his edge; when people are laughing, they don't get hurt by what he has to say. He learned to cut hair in London and is every scaredy haircat's worst nightmare because he does what he wants, won't consider other options and will send you home if you dare to disagree. Recently, he says, he fired two clients. Really, he did. ",You share. emotional plateaus with. your clients because you have a reation with them. Well, I felt like their servant so I fired them.