Sunday 28 December 2008

Print making studio under construction


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


After getting out the press and other gear to help Janice make her first print, the first print made in this studio, what was needed for an efficient and safe print studio was revealed and construction and alteration to the setup began .

What a mess! Boytown! Power tools! Dust! Debris!
Can't make an omelete without breaking eggs eh?

Thursday 18 December 2008

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.

Monday 15 December 2008

Big Mama Goldfish

Down at the Goldfish pond is a pleasant place to be but if you drop a golf ball in there just kiss it goodbye because those swim critters will eat anything.

Self Portrait Lithograph, the artist as a night-mare


The act of creation is to be completely in the Here and Now, the cutting edge of all of infinity, in the moment, the only time that exists, the present.... living the very fact of consciousness....

And achieving this blissful state, if one is no longer a child, is made easier by getting into the rght environment.
The Lithograph studio for instance, where one uses English litho crayons and inks on 30 million year old solid blocks of fossilized tiny sea shells dug up from what was a Bavarian lake bottom and printing the resulting art on French rag linen paper made on 250 year old oak paper making machinery, this run through a 19th century American Litho press.
Here and Now. The only place that truly exists.
I know, weird but true, Hell I didn't make this world, I only draw and paint it so don't ask me.

Artist's and Writer's Xmas Party

                       Bent feather chickens and giant chess at the Nature Park

I get paid to Party!!! Yes!!! I know! Isn't it great? Living the Life of an Artist has it's moments dear reader: The poet and writer Shona Ellen and I facillitated the fun and games at the Tauranga Writers Christmas Party by supplying the materials and the encouragement and getting a mixed bunch of writers and poets and artists to buddy up in small groups and wander around a nature park and create collaborative pieces incorporating words and images on the theme of the Natural World.
Above is one of my solo efforts.
I got to watch a turtle giving birth, got hissed at by a goose, had a Tui (New Zealand native bird) tell me to "Fucking F off" and a Cockat00 say Hello! to me. Every time I walked past it..
I did not know Tuis could talk let alone swear at artists they didn't like.
I didn't know Australian cliche parrots could be so polite.
But I fell in love with the young fluffy feather chickens, they came in black or white and were wandering free with all sorts of other birds and they had a giant chess set so....

Sunday 7 December 2008

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..