Sarah's addition to the Mural Gallery

 Sarah is an Art History major from Berkley, San Fransisco. I helped her realize one of her tiny originals up large at the Mural Gallery. Outdoors and Summer and just around the corner from our favourite bar.. 
Four days of fun

Puppy Painting

This puppy was painted in a shoe store in a large Auckland Mall and as soon as it was done a second, larger puppy was painted in another shoe store 100 metres away in the same Mall.
A really busy week lost in the close examination of puppy fur and earth colours.

 The second puppy. ..

..

Pop Art Murals

Number four in a series of murals decorating the sales headquarters of Yellow Pages. On Friday after work this was a huge white board painted wall and this is what it looked like at midnight on the Sunday.
Another action packed weekend for two fisted painters!!!  I had to again send out a call to my son Eli to help out on this, the most complicated of the mural-in-a-weekend series, and he came in on the Saturday and again on the Sunday. When Eli was a young lad he had his own Graphic Superhero identity: WizWolf.
So this was WizWolf and Johnny to the rescue!! Stand back folks!! Two Fisted Painters are Go!!

1925 Grocery Mural

This mural I have been working on sporadically for ten months now.
 I have had mixed feelings about this mural but am enjoying it now and of course I have learned a lot doing it. It's been like art school in a way. It still needs a couple of days work to finish it and this is what it looked like when I took off to Wellington for a week to paint a giant puppy in a Hush Puppies shoe store there. Commercial art; shopfitting decoration, and now it is back to public art again.

The Mural Artist Mural

Work is underway on the latest mural, called, appropriately enough; the mural artist.
Keri Ann van Doorne a.k.a Girl Friday, the foundation stone of Art School Waihi, is learning all about heights as she helps out on our mural.
We are painting a kid painting kid's art and we are climbing on a jungle gym to do it.
Are we serious?
Most definitely not dear reader. Life is short and fun is there to be had.
Promoting the beauty and joy of kid's art on large public murals is as serious as I will ever get.

A New Mural

Back in the saddle again with another mural.

Painting starts in two weeks.
It's a mural of a young mural artist.
The design of the ground our young artist has her scaffolding on is a work in progress. It will be covered in a kid's art design to represent a field of dreams; a young artist's imagination.

Tairua Library, a wall that wants a mural

This is my current job. A mural is wanted on this wall and I will be submitting designs for it and hopefully will get the job. Wish me luck.

Two Powerful Women. The Poet and the Librarian

Two drawings of a poet reading, below, the likeness. Above, the essence...

 
A drawing of Janice reading her poetry at a cafe in Tauranga. One of her poems, an understated masterpiece of only 5 lines, can reduce grown Women to tears. That's Power my friend..

Under Kris's cool, calm, efficiently helpful and stikingly beautiful exterior beats the heart of a seriously competitive netball player.
Netball is an ultra fast, intense and somewhat dangerous extreme team sport played by thousands of New Zealand Women.
The Maori word for Power, and much else besides, is Mana. In Kris this is as obvious and tangible as her graphically gorgeous thick black hair, eyebrows and coolly lidded black eyes .....
I simply had to paint this Woman!
And you can bet I was respectful and polite with her..

Music Mural Assistant

Janice wanted to help finish the music mural so I turned her lose on the country band's clothing. I reckon she cracked it, I love the dress and the blonde hair, there's lots of little delights in painting murals.
Only the jeans are painted, the shirt, dress and blonde curls Janice did with chalk pastels and clear medium and I provided the finishing touches with scraping off the highlights on the shirt with a tungsten scraper and scraping texture into the dress with my fingernails.
Very hands on and spontaneous, working like this I am as happy as a kid playing in mud.

Waihi Rocket Park Mural is installed 3 Nov. 08

 
While John from the Hauraki District Council and I were up there on the cherry picker installing the 2 mural panels we cleaned off some crude tagging that some enterprising youngsters had sprayed on the rocket (yawn... ) I'd love to get hold of some of these creative infants and show them a few design skills so they could lift their game, and mana, and express themselves in a cooler and more inclusive way. ...dreams are free and as lovely as you want to make them...

Rocket Park Mural progress 23 9 08

The Rocket Park mural panels as I left them today, background finished and ladders finished, edges cleaned up.
The background and ladders have taken me an inordinate amount of time but now at last I can look forward to painting the children next Monday and Tuesday, the chairs and their supporting framework and the rocket control systems which are cunningly constructed from an old kid's bike and a piece of broken gym equipment.
We at Johnny Mulvay Murals and Space Technologies Corporation take our social obligations seriously and we are all, to a man, right into recycling and all that greenie stuff in general like going barefoot in the Summer months.
Somebody's gotta eh?
I mean, there are more than enough shallow materialists wandering the earth consuming and polluting and not buying my paintings(can you believe that? Shocking behaviour!) and keeping up with the Jones's and not knowing the simple delights of warm prickly gravel or cool soft grass underfoot. Poor things.

Rocket Park Mural progress

Mondays and Tuesdays is community service at the Waihi Marae and this is what the Rocket Park mural panels looked like when I walked in today, Monday

American Cars : An artist's subjective view of New Zealand transport history

My Dad in the 1930's, back of the desert road on the North Island plateau. I once had a girlfriend who was into horses but I never really took to them myself.

At the age of eighteen I was mad keen on big old American cars. This one was a heap that belonged to one of my pals. My favourites were pre war Fords and Chev's, Dodges, Oldsmobiles.

I completely restored a 1936 Ford V8 pickup and used it every day in every way for years and years and when it was wrecked in a multiple car pile up one dark November night in 1989 I was heartbroken. Eventually I sold the wreck for $3,500- and I resolved that my hobby would from then on be my living and vocation and I used the money to go to Art School and have been driving Toyota Corollas ever since, my petrol head days over for ever...

Now I am parting with the best of a succession of '80-'85 Corolla wagons and have an old '89 Nissan 4WD diesel that stole my heart the first time I used it to drag a trailer load of firewood up a rough wet overgrown track with absolute ease. It's very roomy inside, has a great stereo and just goes and goes and goes anywhere. Ideal for those hard to get at mural commissions...2013 update; I kept KE 70, it is the Artist's car...

The Rocket Park Mural comes back from the dead to live again and walk among us!!

I got this thing about portraits
This one's called the poem..

And photos of the Rocket Park mural's progress will be posted as soon as there is some progress although I have to say more would have been posted here sooner had not my cheap Chinese computer that I bought just for emails and blogs and online trading and what-not spat the dummy big time after nearly two years sterling service and Andrew at Beach Computers told me the mother board was fucked and the hard drive was munted. Now I'm no computer geek but I reckon those adjectives are kinda universal and the meaning crystal clear...
"Andrew" I says, "do, mate, what you gotta do" and Andrew says to me "Tell you what John, I'll do for you, mate, what needs doin' and how will that do ya?" and I says "That'll do me just fine Andrew, yep, you're my guy, buddy, I trust ya, just do it"
And he did.
I've got, now, 110 gigs up from 40 and speed so fast I not only have to be sober to operate this scary machine but wide awake and both physically and mentally fully fit and shipshape and bristol fashion to the max... oooh ooh

Marley's Mural, a Pictorial History part 6, basic design of the second canvas is sketched out at long last

So many interruptions have slowed progress on this mural but this is not a bad thing, it is just my life..
Now that I have selected the images for the mural and they are sketched in with paint on both seven metre canvases there is a whole new ball game as they say in the U.S.
Yeah, now I have to make it work, as a whole, and I want it to look like music; to have colour, tone, harmony and rhythm.
How I achieve this I don't know but that is the goal and Thursday to Sunday is my next opportunity to get stuck in and go for it, wish me luck eh?

Marley's Mural, a Pictorial History Part 5: the second canvas gets designed

Friday was a warm and bright, sunny Winter's day and I spent the morning making phone calls to sort out, and keep up with, stuff. Then I put on good clothes and walked up to town and got in some R & R, bit of shopping, couple a bevvies, home for tea and then out again for a few drinks with friends. Saturday was a big, vicious storm and the bamboo growing back of the studio smashed the edge of one of the studio roof's clear panels, the water leaking through this was blown inside by the fierce wind gusts but luckily blown clear over the canvas clipped up there and not blown far enough to hit the table and ruin all the drawings etc.
I love storms like that, they remind me of Wellington, where I grew up.
Saturday afternoon and night and Sunday afternoon and night I worked on the canvas in the cold draughty studio and now both canvases are ready for finishing - which will probably take two weeks.

The Waihi Rocket Park Mural, a cautionary morality tale. Part One: In which a recividist criminal hatches a cunning plan to get off the chain gang

Waihi's Rocket Park

John goes down the slippery slope of bad behaviour!
 
THE CRIME and SENTENCE

In an earlier post I told of losing my drivers licence after having a couple of beers too many at my favourite bar in Katikati one hot Wednesday afternoon last January and then driving home via a police road block on highway 2 especially placed to catch just such people as myself.
Busted!!
Eventually I had my day in court and as well as losing my licence for a year and a day I was sentenced to 150 hours of community service.
On the appointed day I had my friend Sandra drive me to Paeroa to the Probation Office and there I explained to the good folk in charge of my sentence how lucky they were to have such a rare and especially fine variegated species of mural artist on their books and what wonderous things I could do for the local community.......
In formal no-nonsense prison guard speak I was informed that I would be on the chain gang for at least a month (at least one day a week labour in service of some community organization or other) and then we would see what we would see..
I see said I. Yes. Yes of course. Sir.

THE CHAIN GANG!!

Well I really enjoyed the chain gang, the work was good exercise and the company great as everyone of my workmates, guys and girls of all types and ages, were all there because they had fucked up in one way or another and there was no bullshit or judgement and we all got on with enjoying our days work and chipping away at the hours we owed the community.
A typical day would be a van load of us arriving at a local small communities' war memorial hall early on a cold Winter's morning with a trailer load of gardening and scrub cutting and lawn mowing tools and we'd all get dirty scratched and blistered and leave the place looking a whole lot better than we found it. Satisfying work actually and no shortage of good humour...

A PLAN IS BEING HATCHED!!

After a month or so in the trenches I told my gang's boss of my local councillor's favourable attitude towards me painting a mural for the community.

A CUNNING DISGUISE IS CAREFULLY MAINTAINED ...

Because of my punctuality and reliability I was given my head, so to speak, and I used my newly returned head to finalize where and what and do some design drawings and submit them for approval to a meeting of ward councillors.

THE PLAN..

Waihi's rocket park rocket will be made more of a feature with the addition of two large portholes through which can be seen the rocket's crew comprising of my neighbours Leah and Kevin's son Daniel age7 and my pal Georgia's daughter Amelie age 5 and my grandson Mateo age 2 and a half inside the rocket preparing to take off.
Kinda cliche but very cute.
Along with this I will be making some changes to the rocket's colour-scheme: red nose cone and silver gantry tower. At present I await the delivery to the studio of two large sheets of thin galvanized metal for me to cut to shape and paint the porthole murals on. These will then be riveted on the rocket.
And my debt to society will be paid. Yay!

WHAT WILL HAPPEN IN THE NEXT EPISODE BOYS AND GIRLS??
WILL ALL BE REVEALED??
WILL THERE BE A HAPPY ENDING??

Marley's Mural, a Pictorial History Part 4: Images and Design Ideas hit the canvas at last

Tuesday 22 July 08: A mural comprised of some of my drawings and photos of musicians and the sheet music to a Ricky Lee Jones song begins to come together on a 7 metre by 1200 primed canvas.
The other 7 metre by 1200 primed canvas will have more of the same and the sheet music to a Warren Zevon song.
The mural panel shown here will be high up on the left interior wall of Marley's Music store and the other will be high up on the right.
I had no definite idea of how this would come together when I started Tuesday morning but it began to take on a life of it's own and I got a wonderful natural high and could not sleep until four in the morning Wednesday.

Marley's Mural a Pictorial History part 2 and the no girls allowed policy and what happens when you institute one..

Events have transpired to slow down the momentum on Marley's Mural but I did manage to cut and prime the two 7 metre by 1200 canvases, the photo shows the priming in progress.

One of the events that transpired was the arrival at my house of my son Sam and two and a half year old grandson Mateo, we three have been very happy here in boytown for a month now and we are all fans of Thomas the tank engine and have extensive railway systems in the lounge and a strict no girls allowed policy.

Does this stop the girls? Absolutely not! In fact my female artist friends are popping in at every opportunity to drink my coffee and ignore me while they play with the two and a half year old chick magnet. I might as well go sit in the corner and read Kafka or something.
Across the road at Leah and Kevin's house lives Annabel, who, although only two and a half, has talked her mother into having Mateo come over there certain afternoons to babysit her. I am, frankly, amazed.
And that's not all - no sooner do we name our wee patch boytown and introduce a no girls allowed policy than I bump into a talented wise woman who cleverly allows me to sweep her off her feet...

Men! Lonely and feeling blue?
Have reverse psychology work for you!
Try our patented No girls allowed policy and see the results for yourself!!!

Torbay Mural Waiake, Torbay Shopping Centre, Auckland

This mural incorporates children's art in it's design and also an old Maori legend and a view of Torbay as it was in the nineteenth century. The children's art was borrowed with the kid's permission and carefully reproduced on the mural wall. On one mural done at Snell's Beach, Warkworth I had children painting their pictures directly on the mural wall. That was fun for all involved.