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homemade batik wall hangings and even simple batik dresses which I sold to a dress shop in town; until the damn things started running, y'know the dye. ART: Your style has an illustrator's feel, rather than a painterly feel. MF: That's the cartoonist in me. I can never make enough money only doing the stick painting, so the rest of my life is spent doing cartoons for magazines,and pr companies. ART: Who inspires you? MF: I've always admired Dufy and Matisse, also Hockney They're sort of semi-abstract, playful. They could almost be cartoonists. I can't stand abstract expressionists and that installation rubbish. I wouldn't mind hiring Manet or somebody to do some brushwork texture onto my things, to give them surface visual interest. Every time I try that it just looks bloody messy and I have to revert to flat colours. ART: Finally, what does the future hold? What direction do you see Mike Flanagan going in? MF: Bigger and better chunks of wood for a start. Can you think of anybody with a forest or veldt I can visit? |
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finding other things to paint on. ART: Other things; like what? MF: Well, I was in Homebase one day and happened to see some of those wooden fence panels, you know the rough slatted things. So I bought one and did a splashy bold still-life on it; petunias. It worked really well, so now I've got a thing about doing paintings on unusual materials. I even did some paintings on garden statues, you know, Pandoras and Venus de Milos found in garden centres. Yes I actually haunt the local garden centres, looking for stuff to do my art on. ART: But your firewood work is a step beyond that, isn't it? MF: Yeah, it's a bit sculptural as well as being a painting. Obviously the wooden stumps tend to suggest what the final thing ends up like. ART: I detect an Afro or ethnic thing happening here. Is that from your South African past? MF: Ya, some black artists in South make primitive yet modern figures out of wood, then paint them in bright colours to depict black, westernised characters like doctors, golfers or whatever. I've always fancied those and tried to incorporate them into my work. I've also decided to depict modern British street characters, so my latest piece shows a guy and girl; two rum looking people straight out of the Bill or something. ART: So how would you go about doing one of your pieces? The couple with the red ties, for instance? MF: I spotted that log in a mate's pile of firewood and straight away saw the potential of doing a pair of people; maybe a man and wife. Then I realised it should be a father and son; the son growing out of the father, in the father's image sort of thing. |
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| Talking to me and showing me his stuff is artist Mike Flanagan. | |||||||||||||||||
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So I cleaned up a few of the rough bits of bark and painted directly onto the wood using a glossy emulsion. Simple flat colours, nice and honest....This one sold a few weeks ago for six hundred. ART: Where do you sell your work? MF: A small gallery in my village, Odiham, takes most of my things. They carry mostly modern art; slightly quirky, so I'm right at home there. ART: Let's go back a bit. When did you first start painting? How did you begin? MF: Art School in Jo'burg in the sixties, then a string of ad agencies as a graphic designer. Those were the days before TV in South Africa. Actually going back to my high school days I used to produce arty things for sale, like painted gnomes, and I remember discovering the medium, batik. So there I was knocking out a big range of |
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When I first saw his nutty, fantastic, painted firewood on the web, I knew I had to phone him for an interview right away. We agreed to meet in his local, the George and Lobster, on Wednesday for lunch. After waiting patiently for twenty minutes, I decided to leave the pub and give him up as a waste of time. Just then a tall stooped figure shambled over from the direction of the bar and banged his pint down on the table, 'So I suppose you're the art bloke then', he grumbled in a strong South African accent. We ordered more beer and a pair of ostrich steaks, and decided to start the interview. ART: Mike, why do you paint firewood? You're not on drugs are you? MF: Man I wish I was, it would be more interesting than this stuff you poms call beer. No, I like the way my stick painting is going. I once painted on big bits of MDF, then realised I could add another dimension by |
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