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

Rose Mulvay June 15 1923 - August 12 2008

Joan, Rose and Peg
Written on the back of this 6x8 photo, in capitals printed in my Mother's hand, is the legend:

Joan Wilsher, Rose Casey + Peg Casey
Arriving well, N.Z. on Feb. 1948 on
the good ship "Rangitata"
Voted the most popular girls on boardMy brother Robert organized our Mother's funeral in Wellington and asked me to officiate. I spoke of my memories of her and encouraged others there to also speak and stood there at the lectern for what seemed like ages as a sort of focal point as at least thirty of the seventy or so people there, one after another, stood to speak of the Rose that they knew and loved.

It was a heart-warming experience for everyone.
I flew back yesterday and today I could do nothing except post this photo, which I have never before seen, one of hundreds that I found at Mum's apartment as my son Eli and I looked through all her stuff. Only the photos interested me, I am our families archivist by common consensus.

My Mother and her friend Joan drove jeeps, staff cars and all kinds of trucks and tank transporters for the British Army in World War 2 in England, France and Southern Germany.
They came out here to New Zealand as adventurous young women looking for a better life away from the strict rationing of post war Britain.
New Zealand is made of people from all over the world coming here for a better life and this continues to be the case.
We are lucky that way.

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.

Marley's Mural, a Pictorial History part 6, basic design of the second canvas is sketched out at long last

So many interruptions have slowed progress on this mural but this is not a bad thing, it is just my life..
Now that I have selected the images for the mural and they are sketched in with paint on both seven metre canvases there is a whole new ball game as they say in the U.S.
Yeah, now I have to make it work, as a whole, and I want it to look like music; to have colour, tone, harmony and rhythm.
How I achieve this I don't know but that is the goal and Thursday to Sunday is my next opportunity to get stuck in and go for it, wish me luck eh?