A silly, non sequitur cartoon about Bishop Stumbers subbing in for an Amblin Entertainment employee based on a friend's birthday visit to Madame Tussauds in Sydney last month.

It took me a lot of tries to end up with the final felt-pen inkwork yesterday followed by spending the night adding the colour digitally on the computer. Then I gave it a few final, finishing tweaks this morning.


Vincent Cavanagh
9 April 2026

First-quarter Blog Digest for 2026. What’s been happening.
 
Website-wise, there are now ‘next-post, last-post’ buttons at the bottom of each World Youth Day Lisbon blog post for ease of navigation through that series. It just took a lot of time, repetition, and wrangling with the Weebly website editor to get it done. Hooray!

Art-wise, I did have a day spent doodling out ideas for Bishop Stumbers cartoons, which was a positive. Most of them were about what said bishop might get involved in on a WYD pilgrimage. We shall see if some of them might get developed beyond their initial ballpoint drafts.
   Rattling about my brain at the moment is a possibility of re-drawing the CavanaghArt bird logos to better reflect my current style of art. The original set of birdies are well and truly about a decade old at this point, in 2026, and I’m certainly not the same artist I was back then. Whether anything actually happens on this idea, or it just keep rattling around my head, is another matter.

​Also, after the suggestion of a friend, I have been down the rabbit hole of investigating what it would take to self-produce stickers from my art and my conclusion was that, for me, it would be far more effort than it was worth. The shear amount of equipment, testing of cutting depths, sticker paper stocks, lamination, and software quirks is, to my mind, on a par with near-professional, home coffee-brewing: metric scales, correct dosage of coffee beans, the right grind size, purified water, puck preparation, flow rate, etcetera. I already have enough furores of my own with trying to convince the home printer to print on the paper-card stock I want it to. The last thing I want is to increase the number of machines throwing hissy fits in my face because it’s the wrong phase of the moon when I’m at my wits end racing to print something off for a special occasion the following morning.
   I’m not ruling out that stickers might happen, just that doing-it-myself is not for me.
 
On the personal front, after 2025, I’m still recovering from burnout. Though it’s not helpful when one continues to get sucked into the temporal blackholes of YouTube (the “new” smoking​), be overwhelmed by dehumanising discourse around ‘Artificially Intelligent’ generation of images online, and catching oneself interrogating any creative idea for art that pops up with whether, or not, it passes cost-benefit analysis. Talk about being brain-rinsed into mechanistic thinking, oi vey!
   It’s all indicative of the fact that there’s been a distinct lack of humour in my life of late. All fret and no play makes for a crabby, frustrated artist. The sensible thing would be to just say, “stuff the lot of it (AI generation) and do it (Art) anyway!” without expectation for it to — ahem — “perform well.”

   ​Thankfully, there have been some diversions in the form of meeting up with WYD friends at a Lunar New Year’s celebration, birthday party invites, wandering around the odd bookshop or two, colouring projects for others, and the odd heritage train ride here and there. A main issue for me is a lack of motivation and sufficient reason for me to overcome lethargy and get outside, physically and mentally.

I know that one should “never say never”, but with where I’m at right now I don’t see myself going to Korea in 2027 for World Youth Day Seoul.
   Don’t get me wrong, I do have strong emotions towards the next WYD, and more so the friendships born of the last one, but that doesn’t out-weigh knowing first-hand what the shear toll a WYD pilgrimage can be on a person and how much it truly demands of them. Which isn’t anything I’m willing to put myself through again—especially if it’s not what God intends me to do.
   At the end of the day, it’s all in His hands, not mine. 

8 Jan 2026 – Year in Review: 2025.

18 Feb 2026 – First new bit of art that I have made in a long while.

27 Feb 2026 – Back to Loftus for the annual Tramway Festival.

3 Mar 2026 – Finally posting about the farewell V Set trip to Kiama last year.

​On a more positive note, I’ll leave you readers with this Part 2 video by Daniel Folta detailing his process of depicting the Nativity in oil paint. For myself, it is a calm and meditative experience watch him bring his painting to life.

​Until next quarter, a holy Triduum and a Happy Easter to you all!

​
Vincent Cavanagh
3 April 2026

Here is a selection of the 35mm film photos — Kodak Gold 200 — that I took whilst on the farewell ‘V Set to Kiama - Christmas by the Sea’ journey from Sydney Central down to Kiama on December 14th, 2025. It was a joint event with the Sydney Bus Museum (Leichhardt) and Sydney Tramway Museum (Loftus) to mark the then coming end of NSW V Set electric trains running on the South Coast Line. Kiama being the limit of electrification on the South Coast. Enjoy!

Vincent Cavanagh
​3 March 2026

On Sunday my father and I rode on the heritage train service operated by NSW ‘S’ set S28 from North Sydney Station, crossing Sydney Harbour Bridge, to Loftus for the annual Vintage Tramway Festival at the Sydney Tramway Museum. The heritage service was organised by Transport Heritage NSW for ticketed passengers only. Below are a few of the photographs that I took on our day out to ride both light and heavy rails 😉

Vincent Cavanagh
27 February 2026

It’s not actually been a year, but it has certainly felt like it since I had made a new artwork. The drought broke on February 14th when I received a request from fellow creative and poet Alexandra Pierotti to draw my own version of a Christian meme that can often be found circulating on social media sites in one form or another for a personal project of her own. She has kindly given me permission to share this with you, for which I am truly grateful 🙏

​I had three false starts, which would begin okay and then, after a point, I’d go and add too much detail that pushed it beyond legibility. All before my brain had time to react to what I was doing. Recalling a previous (unpublished) “doodle”, something finally clicked for me. What I needed to do was cartoon, not illustrate like it was going to be a submission to a scientific journal or something.

You can find Alexandra Pierotti’s poetry on her blog at Poetry For Wellmindedness. Her latest works of poetry can be found on Facebook.


Vincent Cavanagh
18 February 2026

I’m not going to lie. 2025 is a year I’d rather not revisit.

• Yes, it was the Holy Year of Jubilee 2025 “Pilgrims of Hope”.
• Yes, we lost Pope Francis and gained Pope Leo XIV.
• Yes, Carlo Acutis and Pier Giorgio Frassati were canonised as Saints.
• Yes, there were heritage transport trips and watching movies with my father.
• And, yes, I got my (total) step count up an awful lot during the year.

​But, looking back, I cannot see any of the positives for the shear, personal weight of disappointments that have dogged me throughout 2025. (As well as bouts of F.O.M.O.)


At the start of the year, I thought I had a direction as to what I should do only for that smallest glimmer of something—anything—to be taken away. That seemed to be the running theme: think that you might finally get something, or somewhere, and then have it taken away from you. Again.

I expended an awful lot of my energy going basically nowhere, which resulted in my art being the most visible casualty of 2025. Not aided by personal events and the ‘Artificially Intelligent’ miasma afflicting all terminally-online-artists that is: why bother?
As well as treating any brief spark not as an invitation to creativity but as something that had to be put through the third degree of a capitalist cost-benefit analysis loop that buried both the spark, and myself, ever deeper into disembodiment. What point is there in creating if The World is just going to continue in its agenda to eradicate every last place on the face of the Earth that a creative might find to take shelter in and, maybe, even meaning.


2025 was, for me, exemplified by isolation and disconnection. Peer-to-peer faith gatherings that no longer pretend to be for anyone not already living within 10–15 kilometres of the events. Trying to gather interest for things by yourself to mark the Year of Jubilee only to be left by the end of it with a distinct impression that I was at the very bottom of everyone else’s social list or not even registering on their RADAR. Not to mention seemingly everyone else and their dog deciding to disconnect from all social media and not informing anyone whose only connection to those said same people is through social media of what they’re doing BEFORE they do it.

I hope everyone else enjoyed the 2025 Jubilee because my year was shit!


Vincent Cavanagh
8 January 2026

It’s me trying something different. To present a Quarterly “quick guide” to the blog posts that I’ve made in the preceding three months, as well as sharing any articles of YouTube videos that I’ve found interesting. Like a regular digest: what’s happened, what did you miss, I found this interesting, and such like.
​
Also, it’s meant to be something manageable for myself to accomplish and not be something so huge that I dread even thinking about it and just end up leaving it languishing in the dustbin. Here’s lookin’ at you, RANDOM Things.

31 Oct 2025 – A new Bishop comic for All Hallows’ Eve.

​1 Dec 2025 – Announcing my 2026 Calendar as being ready to order.

And yes, I think that there will be a Year In-Review: 2025 blog post uploaded sometime in January 2026, but I don’t expect it to be much more than a brief recap of the year. He writes.
​
I’ll leave you readers with this video about the history of the original Star Wars (1977) posters by Paper and Light.

​Until next time, Merry Christmas everyone! ( ‘Tis a Season! )

​
Vincent Cavanagh
29 December 2025

Vincent Cavanagh
1 December 2025

​Vincent Cavanagh
23 July 2023, 7:30 AM Padua–Venice time | 3:30 PM Sydney time.

A brief explainer on what is Holy Wins/Holywins can be found in this Catholic News Agency article here and, yes, the Bishop now has a live-in/pet(?) dinosaur called Hotspur.

And in other news—after having the thought of it gnawing at the back of my brain for what felt like half the year—I finally began preparing Month–pages for a 2026 Calendar on Sunday, 26 October 2025. Hooray!

Photographs for each month are currently still in the selection phase. Yes, photographs.

​This upcoming calendar will be a collection of images of the different places that I visited in 2025. And because of all the effort that I poured into trying to pull together Jubilee Year 2025 grassroots–young adult pilgrimages to the Shrines of Hope in my diocese left me both mentally, physically and emotionally drained, such that I have had no impetus to do anything artistic whatsoever for the majority of 2025.
Save for the painting of St Clare of Assisi back in July, of course. Which is why the comic at the top of this blog post, for me, is a significant win.

 
I will endeavour to keep you all informed about further 2026 Calendar developments when they are worthy of promulgation.


A happy and holy Hallowtide to you all folks!


Vincent Cavanagh
31 October 2025