The leader of The Irish Rovers, a group known for popularizing Irish music in North America, will showcase his other creative love — painting — with an exhibit at the MAC, opening June 9.
Will Millar, born in Northern Ireland and now living on Vancouver Island, will show 45 new paintings at the McMillan Arts Centre (133 McMillan St. in Parksville) in a show called Scenes from my Irish Roving.
Millar, still a practicing musician, will open the show up on Saturday, June 9 with a musical performance starting at 1 p.m.
“I’m going to open the show with a little bit of my old Irish Rover music,” said Millar. “I’ve got a young band… called the Islanders, who are going to join me.”
The show features oil work mostly depicting scenes from Millar’s childhood in Ireland, combining an observant eye for interesting characters and comedic moments, Millar said.
The scenes depict a bygone Ireland, said Millar.
“The Ireland when I was a child in the ’50s, the old Ireland is completely gone now,” he said.
Millar’s dad would take a button key accordion and his son to the pub, carrying a guitar.
“We’d have little jam sessions, and all around me were the characters that I paint,” said Millar.
In those days, horses and carts still delivered bread and coal. “It’s very soaked into my memory,” Millar said.
Though he paints some Cowichan Valley scenes with animals in them (a few of which are in the show), much of Millar’s work remains on the country he left at a fairly young age.
It was then that his love for art began, with his family encouraging that interest.
“I was an asthmatic kid, so I got to stay home quite a lot, and my mother encouraged me to draw,” Millar said.
“(One time) She went off to a fair that came into our town and she won some prize and she could have got a nice new pot or a pan, but instead she got a big box of watercolours that she gave me, and then I started painting on everything I could find: bits of glass, her tablecloth, you name it. I always loved drawing and painting.”
Even on tours with The Irish Rovers, Millar said, he had pencil and paint nearby. Now, with decades of touring over, Millar said he paints every day, and continues to get his paints everywhere now, saying his clothes and phone are spattered and covered in it.
Now he sells his work on the Island, in Ireland and in Ontario, adding that he never really intended to begin selling work, but is happy that it seems to sell well.
“I have a little quotation from some old Irish artist, who was my mentor and my teacher, and he said: ‘I do not paint as a means to make a living. I paint as a means of living a life.'”
The Scenes from my Irish Roving show opens Saturday, June 9 at the MAC with a musical performance starting at 1 p.m. The exhibit continues to July 14.
