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 Artist's Blues

Bridie sings the blues

I've noticed that I usually write on this blog when I'm feeling upbeat or I've been mulling over something and start to write about it and get to feel upbeat as the writing flows along in it's own way and it all ends up sounding great ( Great!!!! ).

But it's not all great and I read my posts and think I am a phoney or at least not telling the whole story.


Yesterday was nice weather and a girlfriend drove me and my diesel 4 wheel drive to Cambridge to pick up paintings from the R18 exhibition which ended on Sunday.
There was good and bad news: none of the paintings sold-bad I suppose. My paintings had higher prices than all the others-not bad or good, maybe just interesting. The lady that owns the gallery got a crush on one of the paintings and wanted to keep it on display there-good, yes.

And this painting, called "the cradling of femininity" (you can see it on the R18 post further down this page) is displayed in a prime spot in the gallery, it's own area with lights and everything that says check this out here is a painting worthy of your attention.....

Great.

I've had emotional entanglements with two different girlfriends very recently and that and everything else happening in the art scene has worn me out and I feel flat as.
Not the sort of flat that can be relieved by a few drinks, my normal out of the blues, 'cause now I realize that I've lost my driver's licence through drinking and driving and maybe I have a drinking problem.....

Is it possible that I am less than perfect? How can that be in a perfect universe of which I am part? And what a crushing blow to my vanity.... lot's of times other people have made attacks on my fragile self esteem but for my own good self to make an attack on my fragile self esteem by coming up with the nasty, insidious suggestion that I may have a drinking problem is the worst, buddy, the worst. Life fuckin sucks sometimes...

So there you go, balance is restored to this blog in that living the life of an artist is not all beer and skittles and what goes up must come down and moderation in all things and honest self evaluation and that other boring shit when all I want to do is soar....

Roll on the next natural high and painting inspiration, for today is just the opposite.

Art and Music

 In the 90's I spent much time in Auckland, an hours drive from my then home in Warkworth. I was pursuing fame and fortune as a mural painter and murals were much in fashion then as decoration for restaurants, cafes, and upmarket clothing stores.

Fashions change but I had a good time for a while and ample opportunity to explore my Irish heritage at the many Irish bars that sprang up at that time.

There was an Irish renaissance at the time and I embraced it with joy, for, although a common or garden New Zealander I was ill at ease as there had been for some time in this country a great racial debate as the Maori population increasingly demanded their rights and redress for historical wrongs forced on them by the Pakeha settlers in the 1800's

I have no Maori blood and was quite unnerved by this drama as I thought that, taken to it's logical limits, this drama would eventually see me disinherited from my birthplace and kicked out!

Now just because a young man from County Clare decided to make a better life for himself away from the famine that swept Ireland for twenty years after 1840, all of young Peter Mulvay's life in fact, and took ship to New Zealand in 1861, did this mean that I, Peter Mulvay's great grandson, because of my lack of Maori blood, had no right to be here?

This scary line of thought led me to discover that I too had a race and a blood and this was black Irish from the West coast of the Emerald Isle.
Yes, I came complete with the requisite green eyes, slightly olive skin and black hair of County Clare.
And the knowledge that I too had a racial heritage was a comfort to me and I no longer worried about being kicked out of my country of birth.

And I discovered Guinness and single malts and those Irish bars had live music every night of the week! yay!

And I would take a sketch book along to those Irish pubs and after enough Guinness to conquer my shyness I would practice and practice high speed drawing and learn how to draw a violinist's fingers in the middle of a solo, catch a singers soulful expression and etc.

The amount of booze I drank did get in the way of my mural painting business a wee bit but I have so many sketches of New Zealand musicians that I am about to put to good use as paintings.

My mission for this winter is to make paintings and prints of all those drawings and I feel they may just turn out o.k. because they all came from the heart and I have many musician friends whose talent and art I adore.