Chase on a red field

A new addition to the Mural Gallery in downtown Waihi

Training Mural Artists in Nelson

 I was invited to to teach some Nelson artists the many and various methods of  painting large scale in public places.
Funding was found for me, a wall and a design and off I went on the long drive down the North
Island in my mobile mural studio, like an Art Gypsy, to the Inter Island ferries at Wellington and then 
'Baby let me take you on a Sea Cruise' to Picton at the top of the South Island.
Over the bush clad hills along Queen Charlotte Sound and on into the lovely small city of Nelson.
The sometimes controversial and brilliant portrait artist Nikki Romney was the instigator of this project
and we started at 5.30 the next morning, a Friday, screening up Nikki's design with the overhead projector, in the dark. There and then the scale and sizes of the design elements were fine tuned and painting began.
Acrylic paints were new to Nikki, who works in oils primarily.
The mural tutorial project was widely advertised and other artists wandered in to help over the weekend;
there were eight of us on the Sunday, the place was packed, standing room only, by Monday we were down to a tight and efficient team of four artists, myself, Nikki, Betty Salter and Karin Fruehauf and each of us with our own style and areas of the mural to work on. It was fun and I made three new friends.
My Son and grandson live in Nelson and I stayed with them which was lovely and I also took there one of my antique table top etching presses for the Nelson print maker Esther Remnant to try out and it worked perfectly and she bought it.
Altogether a very busy time, especially in the lead up to it all, planning, booking, fine tuning Esther's press,
packing etc. I gave them four days on the mural and left behind three new mural artists and one mural being finished off.
On the way home I had the opportunity to visit the talented mural artist Janet Collenette in Palmerston North with whom I had been communicating by email for a year or so. Mural painting can be a lonely job and it was great to meet so many other like minded people in one week.
I'm still buzzing from it all. Good times...

 Nikki, Betty and Karin

 

 Temptation' by Nikki Romney, Johnny Mulvay, Betty Salter and Karin Fruehauf

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 Mural

Another weekend spent in the office's of Yellow painting large Pop Art onto a wall.

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!!

Pop Art Mural 3

Number three mural for Yellow Pages. I do them over weekends so as not to disturb the staff but this one took from Friday morning till Monday night because the wall was bright yellow and covered in fixed designer shelving which had to be removed and the surface made good and repainted white before work on the mural could begin. A real workup for one guy but fun too. It's nice to be working in a warm quiet office building on weekend days and nights while outside it's Winter in the busy city.

Pop Art Murals

 Here's a couple of murals I enjoyed doing. An average sort of corporation, working hard for their share of the market place have replaced all the posters of teamwork and mission statements that all seem to have that somewhat oily politically correct edge and had me put up giant, colourful pop art representations of happy customers to brighten up the staff's environment. Pictures of happy customers. And isn't that the whole point?

Forest Mural

 This mural is 22 metres long and is painted on 18 panels screwed to a suburban fence in Mount Roskill, Auckland. It is removable, like a circus tent. It is unusual in that it contains some species of small, parasitic creeper plant life and several grass species never before seen. I made them up, playing God just a wee bit. Eat your heart out Darwin...

T

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.

Painting Murals in Winter

Painting outdoor murals in Winter is a slow process. The work is not vigorous, energetic and getting the blood pumping. The work is contemplative and the physicality of it involves tiny careful movements of the hand with the brush keeping the whole body still and all the while the cold breeze keeps one very cool.

Not cool like an awesome hey look at that fabulous person cool but cool like fuck I am so bloody cold what the hell am I doing here I must be mad.

This particular Mural is a 1925 Grocery store and is fully stocked up with masses of detail, has two different light sources and is a complicated exercise in perspective drawing so the slow and cold pace is OK. The frequent days off doing other things like keeping warm and snug allow me the time needed to think the composition through. The passersby don't seem to mind, they tell me they enjoy looking to see what is new on the mural and seem to enjoy it coming slowly, piece by piece.

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.

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.

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...

The Weekly Portrait: Katika

 
This portrait was painted a few years ago and I have put it here because I have been too busy meeting deadlines to make a new one for you and the last time I drew a new portrait was last Friday. I got quite merry on the demon drink and did three excellent fresh and lively pen portraits of three friends of mine and gave them away on the spot so there you are...

Marley's Mural, the continuing story Part 7: a deadline looms!

 
Both mural panels are clipped up on the wall and Marley has agreed to let me exhibit the finished job at the Waikino Spring Art exhibition at Labour weekend (Oct 25) before installing them in his music store. What you see here is the front half of one and the back half of the other as they are both 7 metres long and the painting wall is about 9 metres
Exciting times 'cause I've a deadline on it now!

Savonarola's Chair, the one the fanatics arse actually graced!!!

It's a standout fact that many people get onto this blog by googling Savonarola's chair.
I wrote a wee article about Savonarola's chair way back near the start of this blog and I'm not particularly interested in the man but in the way the chair reminds me of flames and it was in flames that Savonarola died.
Inspiration for a painting.
But so many are the folk who find their way here via Savonarola's chair that I thought it time I displayed a picture of it.

Enjoy.

The Rocket Park Mural continues...

The mural as I left it on Tuesday afternoon. Much time was spent on getting the ladders and chair fixing brackets and background figures and elements just so and I will start to paint the children, six portraits, when I go back to work at the Marae next Monday....

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

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