Musician Drawings

Pictured: Graham in knock down drag out Rock mode playing his girlfriends bass guitar.

Graham makes good money playing Classical/Baroque/Spanish/Gypsy- Jazz guitar in expensive restaurants and at non-paying gigs he likes to turn it up and rock-out to the max...

So I got this friend who is a massage therapist and I was telling her about Graham's virtuoso guitar and she said she would love some of that music for her clients to drift on while she works her magic and makes them all better..
I asked Graham for a CD of his classical guitar blends and he doesn't have one.
What to do?
MAKE ONE! At the restaurant where Graham's playing next Sunday.
A worthy challenge indeed, how hard can it be?
Stay tuned listeners...

Musician Portrait

Last night I went to Michael's birthday party. Mike is a musician and almost everyone there was too. This is my music, a portrait of Alison at her keyboard.

Music Mural, the left hand panel

Music Mural, the right hand panel

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: 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.

Marley's Mural, the continuing story Part 8: one half of the mural is readied for exhibiting at the Waikino Spring Art Exhibition

Live music with Marley's mural as a backdrop

Installed in the Waikino hall just a few hours before the opening night

Nearly ready to go to the exhibition, the second mural panel is on the table awaiting it's turn...

Janice helps me finish the painting, we worked day and night for a couple of days to prepare the mural for exhibiting at a local Art Exhibition prior to the mural being installed in Marley's marvelous main street music shop...

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.