Violin Players Live Drawings

Every one of these drawings were aided by Guinness, single malts and, of course, the music.

Drawing Musicians

Adam and Mike and Alison are having a musical evening on Friday night so Ruthie and I go along to enjoy the music and I do some sketching.
Alison above is playing the keyboard, she thinks she looks grumpy in this drawing but I tell her she was intent on her playing, engrossed in the sounds

Adam playing some of his original music.

Pastel Portraits

Art in Windows Exhibition, Paeroa

The finished portrait of Georgia outside the Quilter's shop in Paeroa

The two finished portraits displayed in the Paeroa Quilter's shop window with quilts and etc. and a third quilt portrait and a panel copy of a section of the famous Villa of Mysteries mural near Pompeii.
This window dressing competition may net myself and Pam, the quilt shop owner, a prize of $250. each and attendant free publicity.

All part and parcel of living the life of an artist: promotion, publicity, marketing. All I wanna do is create cool stuff and get well paid for it but as zefrank says: "it's more complicated than that..."

Life Drawing Class: Mother and Daughter models

Our young model, Samantha, has a go at drawing her Mum who was our other model at the class last night

Samantha throws us her special Star pose and the crowd goes wild..

Mother and Daughter together. Trying to draw two people in short poses was a challenge for everyone but lots of fun for Samantha's bright energy just lit up the whole room.

The Weekly Portrait: Heidi

This commission to decorate an antique oak door with Souvenir de Malmaison roses, violets and a renaissance style angels face became, in the fullness of time, a portrait of Heidi.
It took me ages to do, for reasons that I won't go into here, but when I finally delivered it to Heidi I really missed seeing it in my studio.

The Weekly Portrait: Penny

Isn't she gorgeous? Penny is here playing her Bodhran as percussion for the all girl group "No Boys Allowed" she is singing harmony with.
It's Waitangi Day here in New Zealand which is a national holiday to celebrate political stuff from our colonial past, an agreement between the Maori and the British Crown back in 1840, read: we get Friday off to go to the Waitete Cafe and enjoy live music! Yay! Such pastimes are essential stuff for artist types like myself.... keep me dander up, you know, bathe in the warm glow of the atmosphere of creative people enjoying life....

Portrait of a Woman

I like this painting very much. It's a commissioned portrait drawn from life straight onto the canvas with chalk pastels and finished off in the studio with chalk pastels and acrylic paints.
The pose I chose was one which spoke to me of Judy's personality. The Anthureums happened to be there in the room and I chose them as background for the painting to please myself with bright primary colours and blues and greens which are my favourite colours. Judy loves the colour orange so I imagined that the red and yellow of the Anthureum flower adds up to orange and it turns out that Anthureums have a special meaning to Judy and her family so my spontaneous choice of this plant was a serendipitous event.
Magic! Angelic guidence! I like this painting very much...

Woodcut Print; Shirley

Etching Press Sale Enquiries: johnnymulvay@vodafone.co.nz

The Weekly Portrait; Aja, my daughter in law

I've been cheating on some of these weekly portraits, not all of them are new but I am planning an exhibition of portraits this year and now that the print making studio is done I can return to painting.
I have the portrait of Judy with Anthureums and a portrait of my son Eli to finish and two new portraits to begin, of two pals of mine, Andy and Tony so a busy week is in the tubes and brand new portraits, I hope, to post.

Judy's portrait was unfinished when I had an op on my hand

So Janice helped me get the press set up and I showed her how to create her first print, a dry-point etching on copper. She got the image from the goldfish pond. Below the result.

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..

The Weekly Portrait: a new resolve!

My friend Janice is a poet and I drew this last Friday while she was watching and listening to musicians at the Local Vocal at Leah's Restaurant. I will see if I can post a new portrait every week

My friend Shirley is an Artist. I haven't seen her since I made this sketch several years ago. I have other drawings and a painting of her too. I like drawing and painting people.