That's right folks! After a month's worth of inking and going cross-eyed at various reference photographs, my 2023 Calendar: WYD Lisbon Fundraising edition is now available to buy. Contact can be made via Email or Facebook Messenger.

​Pricings for the calendar are as follows:

Please be aware that the above prices are only for postage within Australia.
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If there is any international interest, we will arrange Air Mail costs appropriately.

And in other news, my father and I spent an enjoyable day out today at the Sydney Tramway Museum in Loftus.

We rode on an Ex-Brisbane Tramway's Four Motor Phoenix tram 548 along with a contingent of retirees also on a day out. Sydney Tramway R1 2001 was otherwise engaged ferrying two contingents of local school children up and down the line.

So, until further news, toodle–oo!

​~ Vincent Cavanagh, 9 November 2022.

So, I'm hoping to go to World Youth Day in Lisbon next year (2023) and at the present moment it is almost assuredly going to be a miracle of the Holy Spirit that my local diocese makes it happen/gets us there (long story not worth boring others about).

The pilgrimage route being taken by said diocese is effectively (for this artist at least) a "Grand Tour" through Italy, starting in Venice, then visiting places such as Bologna, Florence and Assisi to name a few, and staying in Rome for 3 nights, before flying to Portugal for the actual beginning of WYD week in Lisbon, at the start of August, 2023.

Until next time, it's back to the grind stone for me. Bye.

~ Vincent Cavanagh, 18 October 2022.

Yes, I’m finally back on the blog again. For however long that may be.

And the subject that brought not just me but also Bishop Stumbers and the Dean back? Vocations.
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From the 7th to the 14th of August (Sunday to Sunday) was Vocations Awareness Week in my local Diocese. Now my personal thoughts on Vocations are certainly very mixed. Yes, I agree that we need vocations, but I have also been on the receiving end of multiple “fish in a barrel” type situations that vary between outright emotionally manipulating men and women into the priesthood and religious life (ie. nuns), respectively, or going through the mutual shared experience of watching priests (or bishops) make absolute clowns of themselves in the ongoing attempt to drum up even the slightest flicker of interest in young people to consider religious life. Hence my first Vocations Week picture starring Bishop Stumbers as a proverbial One-Man Vocations Band, with noise maker.

Let me explain that a little bit. In many places, if you are a youngish man going to church regularly, you are the often the only one in that age group. That means you are going to be fielding all kinds of ‘Have you considered being a priest?’ questions from just about everyone, and because everyone thinks they are the first and only one to have ever asked such a question, the youngish man takes fright, becomes defensive, or at times even explodes with emotion. Unbelievably intense and constant is this kind of pressure from all sorts of well-meaning people. It would be easier if there were other youngish men going to church regularly, then each of us would get fewer well-meaning questions aimed at us.

Now unless you’re in a parish that barely even bats an eyelid at the mere mention of the words Vocations Week (hello), you are more than likely to have been visually assaulted with countless banners, posters, parish bulletin notices, and such a proliferation of vocations-themed flyers about the church that would make even the most energetic pair of rabbits blush. And if so, you would also be familiar with how after these adverts, and particularly posters, have been so enthusiastically put up for Vocations Week, that they are so often left hanging on noticeboards (or elsewhere) totally forgotten about until someone finally comes along and pulls them all down. They’ve been reports of Vocations posters staying up until the next year’s Vocations Week comes along.
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It is from this part of Vocations promotion that the second Vocations cartoon has its genesis, although in actual fact, it was the first “gag” of the pair to be thought of.

y​I had only just managed to post on Facebook just before midnight on the 14th of August and elsewhere a few seconds after that same stroke of twelve, thus why this cartoon was coloured digitally in black and white (for expediency’s sake). You can see the same image in colour, exclusively, at the top of this post.

Now I do fully admit that I have been using “Vocations” almost exclusively in relation to priestly and religious orders at the exclusion of marriage and single or consecrated life, which are equally valid forms of vocation as stated by the Catholic Church. But if you were to ask any average church goer what ‘vocations’ meant to them they would more than likely respond with either Priests, Nuns, Monks, or all three. Because despite the best efforts of many to remind people that vocations are not just about wearing a dog collar or wimple, or shapeless robes, that is still the prevailing image that comes to many people’s minds. They are actually about responding to God’s personal and specific call. Especially when dioceses are so blatant in their unending desperation for men to join the priesthood in Australia (and in other countries) because of the fear engendered by so many active priests still working beyond retirement age with few below retirement age to replace them, that it undoes any attempt at widening people’s definition of “vocations” and only further entrenches the false notion that “vocations” is just a synonym for priesthood, or maybe religious life.

Look I know that I’m hardly qualified to be talking about any of this and I am not the person to fix it.

The priesthood is being done a disservice by too many people trying to sugar coat or hide all the actual nuts and bolts of that vocation and not equipping people with the knowledge that they are NOT going to be popular, they are Not going to be liked, they Are going to be shouted at and abused, overwhelmed, stuck in red tape, struggling to keep to the schedule of daily prayer, and having to suddenly become a CEO overnight just to run a parish, and that’s before you even get to the actual job description of SAVING SOULS, Feeding the Sheep, Tending the Lambs, forgiving sins through God’s mercy in the confessional and so on.

The kind of teaching young people get about Matrimony at youth events and online in my opinion has become in recent years so top heavy, over chocked full of information, lofty ideals, and scruple inducing aspects of CATHOLIC married life that that it leaves me (and maybe plenty of others) at times cold and wondering if it’s worth the struggle– It is making young people anxious before - or on top of - even getting into the whole jumbled mess of dos and don’ts of Catholic “dating”/courtship and if people suggest consecrated life, it too is presented as needing perfection. Why can’t we just be Bad, or less than perfect, at doing things?​

​Very rarely does a young person hear, ‘if God calls you to something, He will give you the grace and the resources to do it’, or the truth that ‘in our own strength this is impossible, but with God’s help, everything is possible’, or ‘remember you are not on your own, the Holy Spirit is your helper, your power source’, or ‘if you stuff up, God will not reject you, He will forgive you and help you to keep on going’ or ‘we are all in process towards the holiness God calls us to, it is God’s work in us that we seek to co-operate with, and sometimes this happens in leaps and bounds, but usually it is in slow steps’.

This seems to be normal: getting overwhelmed with so much information that you can hardly move and then having priesthood questions coming up behind you whispering in your ear from people, usually at your lowest ebb, while you struggle with the full weight of these expectations that EVERY SINGLE person can and should live EXACTLY as Humanum Vitae says, or at the highest perfection in any state of life without any leeway for those attempting to live up to it, nor any active support or helping hand to help you get up and try again if you happen to fall short of those expectations.

Before you jump on me, yes, I know that the Church herself has a far better understanding of human nature and human frailty, and that everyone experiences God’s universal call to holiness and universal call to mission. Yes, I know that so many speakers have the best of intentions when they place the vision of the ideal in front of us. But it would be so much more helpful if at the same time they shared their struggles in living out these ideals, and if they shared the ways God has assisted them.

Please be kind to the young persons in your life. Remember the burdens of community hopes and community expectations they bear, and instead of adding yours verbally, pray for them, that they will be able to say Yes to whatever God Himself calls them to do. As much as we need holy priests and holy religious, we need holy artists, holy nurses, holy teachers, holy plumbers, holy parents, holy grandparents, holy shopkeepers and holy bus drivers too, don’t we?

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~ Vincent Cavanagh, 23 August 2022.

So, of all the things I could’ve done on a Saturday, I decide to go on the Great North Walk from Cowan to Brooklyn, Hawkesbury River, NSW.

As I mention in the video below, I could not safely film all of it and be able to climb and walk around cliff faces, but hopefully there is still enough to give you a rough idea of what I put myself through on last Saturday (18th June 2022).

​And if after that you aren't dissuade from attempting to copy me, or try something similar, here is a link to more information on the Great North Walk as well as the many other walks around Australia, I think. I've only been focused on the parts surrounding Jerusalem Bay, NSW.

Until Next time. Pax.
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~ Vincent Cavanagh, 21 June 2022.

Last night (7 June 2022), for the first time ever, my father and I made our way into Sydney (and the cold) for the 2022 VIVID Light Festival. It was certainly an experience, of sorts, but I'll post more about that later. In the mean time, here are some of the pictures that I took of some of the light installations that we saw. Too-da-loo!

~ Vincent Cavanagh, 8 June 2022.

So last fortnight I did something for the first time that I thought I would never do: I made a #MayThe4th cartoon, featuring Bishop Stumbers.

Yeah, I don’t think there are that many Vulcans in Star Wars somehow. (Wry smile.)

It’s been a long time since I’d last put a physical pen to paper. It was also nice that it was a fairly simply concept to draw.
For the red accent I used a Copic marker, and I think it helped to tie the whole picture together. I also adjusted the contrast of the image on my computer before it was read to share.

Yesterday (17 May 2022) I finally got around to editing and uploading to my YouTube Channel the videos I took of the ride on the Puffing Billy Railway that my father and I took on our family holiday back in March 2019. It’s of the return journey from Gembrook to Belgrave in the Dandenong Ranges, east of Melbourne. Enjoy.

So, until next time, stay safe and God Bless.

​~ Vincent Cavanagh, 18 May 2022.

I have painted in a while, but I did thankfully do a small "just for fun" painting on Good Friday (15 April 2022).
It's little scene, set in either the early hours of the morning or before dusk, containing a generic-looking Great Western Railway Pannier Tank engine opposite a British Railways Class 08 Diesel shunter that appears to be having bit of trouble starting up. Note the fireworks coming out the top of it.

The basis for this picture was not Thomas the Tank Engine; rather it was because of two OO gauge locomotives that we own: a GWR Pannier and a BR Green 08.

For something different I used a "earth tone" palette of colours consisting mostly of Yellow Ochre, English Red and Sepia, with a bit of Ivory Black added here and there.

God bless to you all and Happy Easter.
He is Risen! Alleluia!

~ Vincent Cavanagh, 20 April 2022.​

On Sunday (13 March 2022) my Instagram account, cavanaghcreative*, was hacked; through my own fault in responding to a message of help from another acquaintance on Instagram and for not seeking proper outside advice (ie. my IT-expert father) as to whether this message was legitimate or not. It almost certainly wasn’t legit.

I don’t know how, but somehow through interacting with the (as yet unknown) hacker gave them a way or permission to kick me out of my own account and change both the phone number, email address and password; and thus, totally remove any future ability on my part to regain the account.

It was 3 days later, on the Wednesday (16 March 2022), that a friend texted me with the conformation that I was hacked. They had received the exact same message as I had, but this time it was using my Instagram profile to do its dirty trickery. (see image below).

Thankfully I never linked my Instagram messages to Facebook Messenger; I have no idea how much worse this whole fiasco could have been if I had.

From an email from a fellow artist on Instagram, I learnt that my Instagram Stories [short videos] had been taken over by content promoting Bitcoin**, just like my acquaintance’s account had started doing in the weeks before I received/responded to the fake message.

Thus began a very trying time for me that lasted the remainder of the week, and following weekend, to twice try and confirm my identity/ownership of cavanaghcreative to Instagram through their Instagram Selfie-ID system.
Which from my personal experience I can say, in the most polite way possible, ain’t worth a cracker.

Yes, I have grown a beard [which shouldn’t really matter with facial recognition] since my profile picture was taken, which for the record actually is a photo of me — not a puppy or an oblique, black and white arty photograph, but an actual, front on, photograph of my face, in colour. (And yes, even just writing about this is enough to make my blood boil again.)

And furthermore, there is/was a photo (or two) of myself taken with other human beings on my Instagram page, which to any other reasonable layman should have been more than enough telemetry/bio-data for Instagram (or parent company Facebook) to check against the two Selfie-videos I sent them to confirm my identity as the legitimate owner of the hacked account, cavanaghcreative.

During this time I proceeded to the best of my abilities to warn family, friends and general acquaintances through texts, messaging apps, and posts on both Facebook and Twitter, that:
— my Instagram was Hacked;
— NOT to respond to any private Instagram messages from me (ie. cavanaghcreative);
— if they themselves were on Instagram, to please flag the account as being Hacked/Spam;
— and to unfollow cavanaghcreative and Block it from contacting them in future.

On 21 March 2022 I received information that my former account was no longer "public" or found via Instagram’s search functionable. It was also devoid of any 'posts' or 'follower' number (see image above).

Either everyone flagging cavanaghcreative as a fake account finally got through to Instagram, or the constant barrage of reporting put the hacker off. Sadly, I just don’t know. Hopefully the hacker hasn’t just left cavanaghcreative as a trojan Private Account; but again, I don’t know.

I would like to thank those who did flag the account as hacked and hopefully stopped any more people from getting hacked through my own personal mistake, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other account for this hacker or many others to keep on tricking people.

So, with that in mind, and given that I have no wish to give Instagram the satisfaction of my creating another account† just for them to inflate their subscription/member numbers, I have taken the step of removing myself from Instagram.

As of 13 March 2022, I am no longer on Instagram. The app has also been obliterated from my smartphone.

For the foreseeable future I will now be focusing my energies on posting content to this blog, not on social media. Which on reflection is probably a good thing, given how (cough cough) irregularly I’ve been posting on here up until now.

Until next time, God bless, stay safe and avoid any badly worded messages or emails.

~ Vincent Cavanagh, 29 March 2022.

For 2 reasons: 1) I've been preoccupied editing our June Holiday videos and; 2) I totally forgot about the website. Apologies.

Okay so let's start with the artwork then; which requires us going back to May:

First off is this watercolour of Saint Pope Paul the Sixth that I did as a Memorial Card for a friend's Priestly Ordination at the end of May this year (2021).

Then we skip back a week, or so, to Pentecost 2021 for this quick, unplanned sketchbook drawing. I'd been pulling my hair out earlier struggling to do something for Pentecost digitally and it wasn't working out, and then just before, say, 10 or 11 o'clock that night I made this with a black, blue and red ballpoint pens with text highlighters as well. You don't always need fancy stuff to make art.

And now come to the missing blog month of July with this watercolour of St Charbel Makhlouf, Maronite monk and priest, and a patron of Lebanon.

At the moment I don't know if, or how long, this "pure watercolour" (ie, no ink outlines or such) style is going to stay. I think, on reflection, that it came about for 2 reasons: 1) during a conversation with a family friend whose eyesight is not what it once was, I realised that some of my more ink-heavy pictures (such as St Joseph and the infant Jesus) had no real clarity.

 I knew what I was looking at, but someone with bad eyesight couldn't untangle the mess of black ink from the sometimes equally dark watercolours; and 2) I'd been watching some watercolour demonstrations on Youtube (link here) and there was one where the instructor painted an picture of Santa Claus, for a Christmas Card, in with just Red, Yellow Ochre and, I think, Payne's Grey or Black. So that was an added impetus to change my style: I wanted to also try painting a face with just watercolour. And that is the condensed set of reasons why I painted Paul VI in watercolour (see above).

Now as I mentioned earlier in this post, I've been, and I am still working, on editing and uploading our June Holiday to South Australia videos to Youtube. If you want to see where we went, I've put the first (in no way chronological) video at the bottom of this blog post. As of 12 July 2021, 12:49pm, there are 3 South Australia videos up on my Youtube channel (link here), with much more to come.

So until next time (barring me forgetting again!) God bless and stay safe.

First of all let me apologise for the brevity of this post, my main aim is just to have a blog post for the Month of June posted in June.
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So at the start of April this year (2021) I decide to join and participate in CG Cookie's Collab2021 (Collaboration 2021) project to turn a concept painting into a 3D scene. To see what we where working from click here. CG Cookie is an online learning community devoted to teaching Blender and other related 3D concepts.

The asset that I worked on way the spice cart, which you see the video below:

This delightful chap (since named Omar Owlson) is the product of a fellow Collab2021 participant's random comment, about halfway thru April, sparking my imagination and I promptly put this together in Adobe Photoshop. And no I haven't changed my signature, that's just my CG Cookie Forum name in the bottom left corner. My CG Cookie portfolio can be found here.

After Collab2021 officially ended after April there continues to be a community-centred Collab2021 Interior Team that's only starting to really get up some steam this June after a fallow period during May. Which is when I made these two following concepts below:

The above image of Omar guarding a bridge in the rain is another in a series of those random comment that ignited my mind, and also possibly contributed my post-Collab "blahs". Over stimulation combined with endorphins and earlier mornings to catch live-streams from the U.S. also didn't help much either.

After recovering a bit from the "blahs" I took on the challenge of turning the Owl-themed candlestick, that I'd concepted before, and turn it into 3D for the Collab Interior. Basically because it was smaller (not necessarily easier) and that nobody else had seemed to taken an interest in doing it themselves.

Another Collab member has actually taken on the challenge of turning Omar into a 3D object, which can be found here. (Click on the Replies under the spice jars post to see the first version and scroll on from their.)

Above the final beauty shot of the candlestick is the OpenGL turnaround (4 views) of it fully textured and painted without the additional lighting in the beauty shot.
I think that it's come up rather well, considering all minor tweaks that I went through today just so that I could be done with it.

So until next time, God bless and stay safe.