Street Art; Nikau / Kereru

14 November 2013, a new Waihi mural.

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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!!

The Horse Mural

Girl Friday and I are taking a break from building and fundraising for Art School Waihi to paint a mural for Ruthies animal farm. The mural is all about horses.

Girl Friday is here working on her very first mural, designing and painting the swallows that live outside the Animal Farm kitchen.
Initial overall design of the mural is lined in and two portraits of Holly the horse painted, one abstract and one realist
Girl Friday's swallows as we left them, unfinished, at the end of two days painting.

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.

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.

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...

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!

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.

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.

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 3. The continuing story of the mural decoration of Marley's Marvelous Waihi music store

I have been busy collecting and collating the various images that will make up Marley's Mural.
Here are a few. The job has been going slowly, at it's own pace and I have been designing another mural at the same time: The Waihi Rocket Park, which is a kid's playground, more on that later, it's an interesting story, to me anyway..
Previous Posts show the modifications I made to the studio to accommodate Marley's Mural and the priming of the two 7 metre canvases.

Finding all my many drawings of musicians, some photos of musicians and making new drawings of musicians and preparing all these for loading in the computers and printing then as transperancy's ready for screening up on the canvases via the old overhead projector has been an effort. Me poor wee brain has been stretched and scattered and subject to hanging up and not infrequently crashing.

Perseverance has found me still sane, luckily, and ready to boogie, design-wise. Yay!!
You can read all about it in the next thrilling installment... 

Music lessons in Marley's sound proof room at the rear of the store

Marley's Mural

Marley has a music shop in Waihi, recently moved to a larger premises right on Waihi's main street, amongst the best cafe's and so on. Great location.
I like Marley's music shop. It's a great place to just be in and he has such a range of anything you may want in the music line. I am learning Spanish and have bought several CD's of Latin American music from him ( I am interested in travelling to Mecico and Chile)

Marley's new shop is in an old building with a very high stud. Above all the CD and album racks hang all the instruments, guitars of all kinds and violins banjos ukeleles etc. and above that is high bare wall running down both sides of the shop to the back.

I saw, and talked Marley into agreeing to buy, two canvases seven metres by twelve hundred covered with a rythmic montage of paintings of New Zealand musicians, all the paintings taken from my sketches of Muso's playing in pubs and cafes, of which I have many. Many.

The canvases will be simply stapled to the walls up there, one each side of the shop, and perhaps the edges covered with light wooden battens, not so much to frame them but to hide the edges and staples.

Now that I have finished and delivered my doll museum commission (see earlier post) Marley's mural is the current job.

It is Saturday morning and today I start this job, beginning with this written record of proceedings.

On Thursday Sandra came by to pick me up for company on her drive to Tauranga to Tanjis art shop and I rolled out my canvas stash and saw I had seven and a half metres so we called into Harvey's furnishing at Tauranga after we had spent up large at Tanjis and I bought another seven metres of canvas, sufficient now to do Marley's mural.

My next trick is to alter the studio to accommodate a seven metre painting on the wall. That will be today's first job after a shower and brekkie etc. Yes I am sitting here unwashed at the computer having a pre breakfast breakfast of coffee and cigarettes and Amy Winehouse live in Berlin is on the stereo. I'm happy....

Art History

Waihi 1912

This morning I emailed my blog address to a friend in the U.S., Andy Reurich. I told him he could also google my name to find the blog and when I finished emailing Andy I googled my name and mein gott there is a heap of stuff there on me including all contact details.

And if I was a wee bit worried about baring my soul on this blog it's like forget about it! I'm out there in the world whether I like it or not. Privacy? Shit, that's a last century ideal, a philosophical concept for academics to ponder on.

I realized I can be found as easily as my art heroes, an interesting thought..

And speaking of art heroes I am reminded of one in particular who inspired me at a time when I was riven with self doubt (don't you just love words like riven? the english language is so cool).

This was a New Zealand artist, a girl of about 11 years old who was on the tele making a bit of a splash with her wonderful colourful abstract paintings and the media person interviewing this young lady asked her who her favourite artist was and without hesitation the young artist said "Me!"
And I was immediately gripped with a strong and happy emotion and thought "YES!"
This young lady and myself were then added to my list( it's a bloody long list mate) of art heroes.

No, I am not that vain but being one of my own favourite artists is a great tool to keep my dander up and not fall prey to depression and self dought as I am wont to do.
Many times I will do a drawing, a portrait, that turns out pretty good and I will look at it and it is like looking in a mirror. I see myself in the drawing because it is in my style and looks so old and familiar as to be almost boring as in it looks like it has existed forever, or as long as I have lived and is an old and achingly familiar friend...

If you know what I mean, hope that makes sense.

Most of my favourite artists are giants in Art history unlike myself and the young lady I saw on tele who so inspired me and some of them are: Shiele, Toulouse-Latrec, Degas for drawing and Vincent, Goya and Rembrandt and the unknown master who painted the Villa of Mysteries mural on the outskirts of Pompei about 63AD for their ideals or suffering or ability to express the inexpressable. But there are so many, so many.
I like to think of art as the oldest profession in the world, dating from the stone age when bands or small tribes of people would have had a leader counseled by a shaman and an artist (perhaps the same person) to work the sympathetic magic necessary to survive in a place of danger and wonder.
Another hero of mine is Betty Edwards who wrote two great books on drawing that take us away from sympathetic magic and into the workings of our bi-cameral minds. If you are at all interested in drawing read Betty.