Brian Mulvihill

Brian Mulvihill is a Canadian artist. A perfect personification of what one could refer to as a romantic artist. A traveller artist. Except that his romanticism recedes into intimacy and privacy when the process of globalisation begins. He is a pioneer of global interactions, cultural and spiritual. In the exploration of the global village as the essential home to every and all essential beings.

Of course globalisation goes far beyond the cultural, the existential. Since Brian’s early explorations, in the seventies, controversial aspects have emerged, including the overwhelming speculative market expansion and concurrently the political consequential evolution, that we all have come to recognise as ineluctable, perhaps controversial, whether we like it or not. 

Brian Mulvihill knows all of that. Perhaps acknowledging the unforeseeable powers unleashed in the process or by the process. Yet remarkably his persona as an artist and sentient being pursues the practice of a lifestyle that reflects the fundamental principles of being in relation to the village, and of belonging to the village.

A way of life that constructs relative meaning through the existential intertwined with spiritual discipline and art making. Much indebted to Buddhism with an intimate knowledge of Tibetan teachings which led Brian Mulvihill through the portals of Asia. The global village raison d’être. The vast dragon. Awakening. 

An early flirtation with fluxus art, followed by his more established performance cum conceptual work known as World Tea Party that has been presented all around the world, has led now to a prolific production of paintings on rice paper porcelain and canvas. Paintings based on Chinese calligraphy. Where a term, a character initiates a course of action, a development imbued with a sense of the spiritual and the will for pursuit and a pictorial experience. 

Interestingly painting re-emerging  as a recurrent Phoenix, rising from the ashes to restate the meaning of art. Almost like a need that brings contemporary artists with an eclectic or rather conceptual background towards a kind of ancestral painting.