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 Rocket Park Mural comes home to Daddy

 
My community service is finito, yay! All my hours done and now I finish this job as a volunteer. So home from the local Marae comes the Rocket Park mural. And the two steel panels are set up in my bedroom as the studio is chocker with Marley's Mural in progress and both have a deadline of Oct 25 just 2 weeks away. I've also got a painting half done I am wanting to exhibit at the Waikino Spring Art exhibition, same time, same deadline. Challenging times and I have to tune out most of the people (with a few exceptions) and events around me in order to finish 4 seperate mural panels and one painting in 2 weeks. So the current stock market crisis can go to hell without me. I've got painting to do, lots of it..

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.

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 begins

The two sheet steel panels that will be riveted onto the rocket at Waihi's Rocket Park playground to represent portholes on the rocket showing children within ready to take off for outer space are taking shape at last.
After much time waiting and, I thought for a while, waiting in vain, people in the local Council and the people in charge of my Community Service sentence have got together and agreed that an experienced mural artist painting a mural for a local children's playground as part of his sentence would be a good idea.
I have to say I agree. I first suggested the idea right at the start of my 150 hours community work sentence and be careful what you wish for 'cause all dreams come true....
I got taken off the chain gang and put to work at the local Marae which was O.K. but too easy and finally, with not many hours remaining on my sentence the mural project came through and the galvanized steel sheets were delivered to the Marae (I wasn't allowed to do the job at home in my studio) for me to cut to shape, clean, prime and paint the designs on.
This is how far I got as of today, the children drawn up and redrawn in Paynes Grey acrylic and the background mostly sketched in in washes of Paynes Grey.
Next Monday and Tuesday: Colour!! Yay!
The kids depicted are Daniel and Annabel from across the road, my Grandson Mateo, Tawhiri and Paige, two kids from the Marae and my young friend Amelie who blessed my studio at it's opening a year and a half ago when she was four by creating, at my request, the first original work of art therein.
I will be doing more hours on this mural than I owe and working harder, mentally, than I would on the chain gang but I still think it's a good idea. I am no stranger to doing art for free, 'specially in the early days of my mural painting phase, so it's no bother really.
My life as an artist has always been either a feast or a famine. This particular job is a feast of goodwill.

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

The Rocket Park Mural dies an ignominous death

At a meeting of local Ward Councilers this design idea of mine was chosen to enhance Waihi's Rocket Park, a job I was going to do for free as part of my Community Service sentence that a judge gave me for a drink driving conviction. Unfortunately the people in charge of supervising my sentence had me work out my time helping out at the local Marae instead.
They were kind and flexible enough to allow me to disappear for a while to organize for myself the painting of a mural for the local community as my community service but little old me caught between the Hauraki District Council and the Justice Department and with all the good will towards this idea it just, in the end, didn't fly.
All part of living the life of an artist dear reader...
I had intended the murals (one each side of the Rocket) to be based on photographs of children and to be a very realistic illusion but with the scale slightly enlarged and the tones in the painting exaggerated so the paintings worked for the viewer at a distance.
Looking forward to the challenge I was but there you go... heaps of other stuff to paint anyway.

The Waihi Rocket Park Mural, a cautionary morality tale. Part One: In which a recividist criminal hatches a cunning plan to get off the chain gang

Waihi's Rocket Park

John goes down the slippery slope of bad behaviour!
 
THE CRIME and SENTENCE

In an earlier post I told of losing my drivers licence after having a couple of beers too many at my favourite bar in Katikati one hot Wednesday afternoon last January and then driving home via a police road block on highway 2 especially placed to catch just such people as myself.
Busted!!
Eventually I had my day in court and as well as losing my licence for a year and a day I was sentenced to 150 hours of community service.
On the appointed day I had my friend Sandra drive me to Paeroa to the Probation Office and there I explained to the good folk in charge of my sentence how lucky they were to have such a rare and especially fine variegated species of mural artist on their books and what wonderous things I could do for the local community.......
In formal no-nonsense prison guard speak I was informed that I would be on the chain gang for at least a month (at least one day a week labour in service of some community organization or other) and then we would see what we would see..
I see said I. Yes. Yes of course. Sir.

THE CHAIN GANG!!

Well I really enjoyed the chain gang, the work was good exercise and the company great as everyone of my workmates, guys and girls of all types and ages, were all there because they had fucked up in one way or another and there was no bullshit or judgement and we all got on with enjoying our days work and chipping away at the hours we owed the community.
A typical day would be a van load of us arriving at a local small communities' war memorial hall early on a cold Winter's morning with a trailer load of gardening and scrub cutting and lawn mowing tools and we'd all get dirty scratched and blistered and leave the place looking a whole lot better than we found it. Satisfying work actually and no shortage of good humour...

A PLAN IS BEING HATCHED!!

After a month or so in the trenches I told my gang's boss of my local councillor's favourable attitude towards me painting a mural for the community.

A CUNNING DISGUISE IS CAREFULLY MAINTAINED ...

Because of my punctuality and reliability I was given my head, so to speak, and I used my newly returned head to finalize where and what and do some design drawings and submit them for approval to a meeting of ward councillors.

THE PLAN..

Waihi's rocket park rocket will be made more of a feature with the addition of two large portholes through which can be seen the rocket's crew comprising of my neighbours Leah and Kevin's son Daniel age7 and my pal Georgia's daughter Amelie age 5 and my grandson Mateo age 2 and a half inside the rocket preparing to take off.
Kinda cliche but very cute.
Along with this I will be making some changes to the rocket's colour-scheme: red nose cone and silver gantry tower. At present I await the delivery to the studio of two large sheets of thin galvanized metal for me to cut to shape and paint the porthole murals on. These will then be riveted on the rocket.
And my debt to society will be paid. Yay!

WHAT WILL HAPPEN IN THE NEXT EPISODE BOYS AND GIRLS??
WILL ALL BE REVEALED??
WILL THERE BE A HAPPY ENDING??