Village Squire, 1977-11, Page 13Mow Mulhern
Rediscovery childhood creativity
and working toward
discovery in the art world
For Mona Mulhern, it's taken a rediscovery of the little girl in
herself to help her mature as an artist.
The Goderich artist has been slowly evolving in her style in the
past year and has been working hard at also having her work
seen more. During October her work was on display at one of the
branch galleries of the London Public Art Gallery.
The evolution in her work has been away from realism and
more into the fantasy world. she says and seems to be a
rediscovery of the creativity of her childhood. That childhood was
spent as an only child on a farm near Regina. Her father died
leaving her and her mother alone on the farm. She spent a lot of
time on her own and used to sit by a little stream that flowed
through the farm drawing for hours the things that surrounded
her with a crayon. She's still drawing many of the same things.
Her childhood established a love of nature in her, Mona says
that has stayed with her. Her adult art work includes pictures of
natural things. flowers. trees, leaves even garden things like
onions. tomatoes and broccoli.
Her interest in drawing continued when she and her mother
moved into Regina until she had a confrontation with an artist
who toured the Regina Schools who abruptly told her one day
that the way she was drawing things wasn't proper. She
withdrew away from art, she recalls. Later in her high school
there was a tremendous art program and she envied students
taking part in it. but didn't feel she had the talent. It was the
same situation when she attended the University of
Saskatchewan, always admiring, but hesitant to take part.
After graduation she went to work with the YMCA. first in
Fredericton, New Brunswick and later in Chatham. Ontario. She
worked planning craft and art programs for the organization. In
Chatham she met and married Jim Mulhern, an insurance
adjuster and decided the job at the Y which required her to be
working at hours that didn't allow her to be home with her
husband enough, had to go. She got a less demanding job and
somehow realized that if ever she was going to get involved in
art, now was the time to do it.
Chatham was undergoing an arts revival at the time. An old
high school scheduled for demolition was saved through the
efforts of artistically -minded people in the city who wanted to
save the auditorium in the building. 1They also turned a
gymnasium into an art gallery and several smaller rooms into
studios.
Mona started back at art there under the direction of a teacher
who had been heavily influenced by the Group of Seven. So she
began in oils, but later became interested in watercolours.
Her husband was transferred to the Huron county area and
Mona had to pick up new contacts. She visited Lotte Zonnenberg
who had opened her summer house south of Auburn on the
Maitland as a shop and gallery called Brigadoon. She asked for
advice as to people from London area who could help her.
She was told that Verne Lougheed was one of a number of
artists who might be able to help on a project basis, where she
would assign a project and Mona go home and work on it.
The combination clicked for her, she says. Her instructor had
an intuitive approach that seemed to fit in well with her own
personality. She also advised Mona to put her paints away and
get into drawing. She did and became "so hooked on drawing
that painting never became a real need."
Which was convenient since her personal life made painting a
problem. She gave birth to three children and children and
paints just didn't mix well. She also discovered so many
possibilities in drawing.
She went to H.B. Beal, the famous technical school which has
a famous art course, for night school and worked away on her
own, talking to other artists when she felt she was having
difficulties.
She took about four years of courses and, as her children
became a little older, she was able to find more time for her
work. Working mostly by herself, she says, she was able to come.
to grips with herself. For a while she had seen other people's
work, admired it and tried to adopt that style but now she found
that trying to do other people's art didn't work for her. She
started to work with coloured pencils and liked it. She liked the
detail it gave her drawings, even though she had always liked a
lack of detail in other people's work.
An artist, she says, has to really get involved with herself and
do what she really feels, not what others want her to do.
Perhaps because of her own problems in school, Mona is very
concerned about the possibility of creativity being stifled in the
schools by teachers who are either uncaring or incompetent. "I
VILLAGE SQUIRE/NOVEMBER 1977. 11.