The Weekly Portrait; Aja, my daughter in law

I've been cheating on some of these weekly portraits, not all of them are new but I am planning an exhibition of portraits this year and now that the print making studio is done I can return to painting.
I have the portrait of Judy with Anthureums and a portrait of my son Eli to finish and two new portraits to begin, of two pals of mine, Andy and Tony so a busy week is in the tubes and brand new portraits, I hope, to post.

Print making studio

Etching Press Sale Enquiries: johnnymulvay@vodafone.co.nz

This mangle from which I made a printing press came from my families farm and has been in the family for at least 90 years. It's got to be my most beautiful toy. The zinc and copper plates stacked on the wood shelf under the press bed and adjacent to all that cast iron and steel framing must, in my imagination, have an electrolysis effect and thus the press has life. Haven't given it a name but it has a phoenix embossed on it's two sides. Lovely.

One thing left to do in the printmaking end of the studio is build a fume extraction box for the acid bath and then print making courses can begin.

Print making attractions

Etching Press Sale Enquiries: johnnymulvay@vodafone.co.nz

Corrosive and lethal fluids, just the smell of some of these puppies does serious damage

Exotic and antique crystals, powders and resins along with filthy black sticky substances and nasty smelling solvents, both antique and modern

Metals! Copper, Zinc, Aluminium, Steel, Old cast iron and wood machinery designed to exert tons of pressure through thick felt pads.
And after all the careful and time-consuming effort working with things dangerous and dirty and when ones hands are filthy and smelly the exciting part involving damp highest quality hand made papers must have clean hands, very clean hands and just when you are raring to go and get a result you must stop and get clean and calm and together for the actual printing.
I don't know why exactly but Women seem to love this work, it seems like such a guy thing, filled as it is with dirt, danger and techo chemical processes and vile fumes and sticky filth but lifting the print off the plate at the end is like a birth and the new baby is always, in some way, unexpectedly beautiful.
Today I plan to have the printmaking part of the studio finished and ready to roll. Yay!

The weekly Portrait: Fiona at her wedding reception

Fiona is my niece and this soft ground etching is from a sketch I made of her on her wedding day.
I made this etching at a class I took as a refresher for my printmaking last year and now that I am creating a printmaking studio such things are coming to light.
It has been very stressful having the studio turned upside down and inside out but it will soon be ready and things I have had stashed away in storage for years now have a place and a purpose.
Like me! A place and a purpose! I like it, good way to start the day.

The First Drawing of the New Year!

Saturday arvo in the local Returned Services Association smokers bar and there on the wall I saw a sheep lurking in a patch of unpainted wall from which a machine had been removed.
Just happened to have on me my trusty 2B pencil and no one was looking.
It's my job don't you know....

Print making studio under construction

Etching Press Sale Enquiries: johnnymulvay@vodafone.co.nz

After getting out the press and other gear to help Janice make her first print, the first print made in this studio, what was needed for an efficient and safe print studio was revealed and construction and alteration to the setup began .
What a mess! Boytown! Power tools! Dust! Debris!
Can't make an omelete without breaking eggs eh?

The Weekly Portrait: Leah's niece, age 14

Judy's portrait was unfinished when I had an op on my hand

So Janice helped me get the press set up and I showed her how to create her first print, a dry-point etching on copper. She got the image from the goldfish pond. Below the result.

Big Mama Goldfish

Down at the Goldfish pond is a pleasant place to be but if you drop a golf ball in there just kiss it goodbye because those swim critters will eat anything.

Self Portrait Lithograph, the artist as a night-mare

The act of creation is to be completely in the Here and Now, the cutting edge of all of infinity, in the moment, the only time that exists, the present.... living the very fact of consciousness....

And achieving this blissful state, if one is no longer a child, is made easier by getting into the rght environment.
The Lithograph studio for instance, where one uses English litho crayons and inks on 30 million year old solid blocks of fossilized tiny sea shells dug up from what was a Bavarian lake bottom and printing the resulting art on French rag linen paper made on 250 year old oak paper making machinery, this run through a 19th century American Litho press.
Here and Now. The only place that truly exists.
I know, weird but true, Hell I didn't make this world, I only draw and paint it so don't ask me.

Artist's and Writer's Xmas Party

                       Bent feather chickens and giant chess at the Nature Park

I get paid to Party!!! Yes!!! I know! Isn't it great? Living the Life of an Artist has it's moments dear reader: The poet and writer Shona Ellen and I facillitated the fun and games at the Tauranga Writers Christmas Party by supplying the materials and the encouragement and getting a mixed bunch of writers and poets and artists to buddy up in small groups and wander around a nature park and create collaborative pieces incorporating words and images on the theme of the Natural World.
Above is one of my solo efforts.
I got to watch a turtle giving birth, got hissed at by a goose, had a Tui (New Zealand native bird) tell me to "Fucking F off" and a Cockat00 say Hello! to me. Every time I walked past it..
I did not know Tuis could talk let alone swear at artists they didn't like.
I didn't know Australian cliche parrots could be so polite.
But I fell in love with the young fluffy feather chickens, they came in black or white and were wandering free with all sorts of other birds and they had a giant chess set so....

Music Mural, the left hand panel

Music Mural, the right hand panel

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..

Savonarola's Chair, the film buffs version...

This is a photo of me looking for a Savonarola chair at an art exhibition in the old Masonic lodge building on the riverbank at Warkworth in late 2003.
I was unable to find one at this time but I did find a gorgeously dramatic portrayal of one on Eisensteins 1944 movie Ivan the Terrible (Part One) which my son Sam gave to me, in the scene where Ivan is laying seige to Kazan.
Do check it out. You will not be disappointed.
All you many many many many Savonarola chair fans who have found your way onto my humble art blog by googling Savonarola's chair should know that this chair is an Ancient Roman design of folding camp stool used by the Roman legions and unfortunately named after a religious idiot, a rabble rousing fanatic who caused a fuss in Florence in the 1490's and was responsible for corrupting the vision of one of my main drawing heroes, Sandro Botticello, by filling him with guilt and shame, completely destroying this brilliant artist's mojo and this maniacal obsessive fuckwit of the first order was eventually burnt alive by the Catholic authorities and I find it somewhat disturbing that amatuer antique investors and furniture fashionistas should be forever and always landing on my blog looking for information on a Roman General's camp stool unjustly named after a Goddamned iconoclast....
And it's kinda fun where life takes us and definitely fun to have an abusive self righteous tirade just like my man Savonarola, only I don't insist on you following my belief system.
Whatever you believe will, I believe, be revealed to you as truth.
Belief systems are surely like everything we are conscious of: infinite in variety and a matter of choice in what we focus on.

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.

The Weekly Portrait: Dr. Mathieson

Some years ago I was talking with a rough character in the local pub at Warkworth where I lived for 20 years. We got on the subject of Doctors and my companion told me of a rash he had on his hands and forearms which he took to a local Doctor to look at. The Doctor looked at it and without a word began to write out a prescription, probably for antihistamine. My companion told how he got very angry at this and abused the Doctor in no uncertain terms and stormed out vowing not to pay for the visit, big drama because the Doctor could not or would not tell him what the rash was and why the rash was but would without much thought add some kind of drug to the patients system.....
He took his rash to Doctor Mathieson, the other Doctor in town at the time and Doctor Mathieson looked at the rash and asked him if he worked in tomatoes?
Yes picking tomatoes on a local farm and Doctor Mathieson told him that tomatoes exude a substance on their skins that keeps mould at bay and that some people's skin reacted to this natural defense of the fruit and advised my companion to get a different job.
That was when Doctor Mathieson was added to my list of heroes and much later we became friends and would share stories and I would draw...

The weekly portrait: Mike singing and playing the guitar

I drew this portrait of Mike with a sepia pencil in my small (A5) parchment paper sketch book.

This sketch book is designed for drawings in ink.
Mike likes me because I once introduced him to a friend as a guitarist and most people introduce him as a plumber.
Easy call that one. I know ones' day job is about mere survival of the animal, a necessary evil and possibly good for meeting people and experiences and giving food for thought and dreams wheras ones' talent and passion is about expressing and nurturing the soul.

The Weekly Portrait: Judy in the sky with Anthureums..

This painting is a commission, a birthday present to a beloved sister.
This is the underpainting made with chalk pastel on canvas and sealed with clear medium brushed over the pastel and all done with Judy sitting before me.
It will be finished in the studio in acrylics.
A few photos I took of Judy at the sitting will aid me in catching the facial expression which most speaks of her real self.
It's all in the eyes and mouth.
Lovely and fascinating work..

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...