MullingART a tribute to late partner

"I want to know where they started and why they’re painting 20 hours a day, drinking paint water instead of their tea – which happens!” says Don Mortell, the creator of MullingART, a podcast dedicated to grassroots art in Mullingar and Westmeath.

Many will know Don as a friendly face behind the Boots counter in Harbour Place Shopping Centre, but his podcast gives listeners an intimate look at what makes artists and creators do what they do – their influences, experiences and what drives them.

“I love the exploration and the discovery of art and artists. There is so much talent in this county, and while I may drift outside the borders every once and while, I think we have an undercurrent of really great art here,” says Don, an artist with a background in illustration.

“My interest in other artists comes from wanted to know how they started out, I want to give them a platform. I have zero interest in professional artists, and not because I don’t respect them or like them, it’s simply because… there’s a saying ‘Buy art from living artists because the dead ones don’t need the money’.

“Popular artists don’t need my help or assistance in any way. So I want to talk to the people who are starting out, or are in the middle of it, and they don’t know which way to turn. And if I can give them a bit of a leg up by spreading word of what they do, then the podcast is worth it.

“Music is what this town does, but I think there’s room for both,” says Don, who so far in his podcast series has spoken to Cúige founders, Andrea Cullen and Rachel Coyne, poet and storyteller Paul Timoney, filmmaker Liam Hall Walshe, and painter Olivia Finn.

He has host of fresh new artists and creators lined up for 2023.

“We discover their individual stories, some of them I know, and some of them I’m learning along with the listener,” said Don. “I think that’s the thing that I love about it, that I’m learning as much as you are as a listener. I hope my questions aren’t too incisive, I don’t want to get down to the bare bones of their psychology or anything like that, I just want them to revel in the joy they have in doing what they do.

“If they want to share more, then the more efficient the message is going to be for anybody else going on a similar journey. But ultimately, it is about promoting them as an artist, but also as a person as well.”

The first podcast in the series is dedicated to his late partner, Brigid Walsh, who died from cancer in June 2021. A prolific and talented artist, Brigid was incredibly community focused, and dedicated a lot of her time to the creators and artists of Castlepollard, where she was based. Don credits Brigid for igniting the idea of the MullingART podcast, and said it her “parting gift” to him.

“Brigid had this habit of coming into the house and coming out with diktats. ‘Today we’re going to do this, that or the other’ and so on. Anyway she came in one day and said, ‘You know something, you should do something with that stupid English accent of yours’, he laughs.

“Somewhat taken aback, I said, ‘Oh really, like what?’, and she said, ‘I don’t know, podcasts or adverts or something’.

“It went on the backburner because she came out with a lot of these ideas, but after she passed away, which was June 2021, after a couple of months of not knowing where to go next, I decided to take her at her word.

“I booked in to a studio in Dublin really just to record a demo session. I was talking to the producer, and because I was still in that sort of funk where I didn’t know what I wanted to do, I asked him what he thought, and where should I be going with this. And he said, to get my confidence up, I should think about doing a podcast, and do it about what you know – and for me that was art grassroots and up. So with her inspiration, and his input, I thought I’ll go for it.”

In fact, MullingART had started 20 years before that when Don first came to town.

“MullingART was a project I ran when I came here initially about 20 years ago. I knew a fair few artists who didn’t have the confidence to exhibit or put their work anywhere further than their back rooms. I used to take a couple of pieces of their art and place them in shop windows, so you had a people’s gallery so to speak, a 24-hour job, and that would give them some exposure, and then we’d have an exhibition of all the pieces in the one place. So that’s where the idea originated.

“After Brigid passed away, it took me months to try get my confidence back to build up to doing something. So I thought the best way to do it is make the first programme about her. That first one was all about her work, and in a way that was her gift to me to actually go through that hour and become more comfortable with what I was doing.

“The podcast is gaining some momentum now, it’s not getting thousands of downloads or anything, but it’s gaining legs. From the various podcast platforms that you use, you always get stats on how many downloads you’ve had, and I take absolutely no notice of that! I do it for the joy of it. I do for even just a half an hour chat with an artist, and getting into the bare bones of what they do and why they do it. I do it for the joy of it, and I really think that was her gift to me.”

Born in London to Irish parents, who moved to the UK “about 150 recessions ago”, in the late ’50s, Don said “Mortell is a good Cork name”.

“My father was from Charleville, north Cork, and my mother is from Longford. My dad’s homestead was a little whitewashed cottage halfway up a mountain. It was lovely for three weeks of the year, but for the rest of the year it was forbidding because the rain would come down in sheets.

“I was a qualified cartoonist and illustrator. That was all I knew, that was my thing and it was always going to be my thing. Brigid was an insane painter, she loved to paint, she loved mixed media, she didn’t stand still when it came to art.

“I mean most people when they can’t sleep, go downstairs have a cigarette and a glass of milk or whatever, but it would be the middle of the night and I’d hear another virgin canvas being unwrapped. And there she’d be in the kitchen, painting away. She was a furious painter, she was always pushing the arts in and around Castlepollard as well. She had multiple exhibitions in the hotel. I facilitated a couple of smaller exhibitions for her as well, and we just gelled as people, and as creators I suppose.” Don explained how he and Brigid met in the modern way, on Plenty of Fish.

“She fell for the fact that I corrected some of her spelling in her texts, and that was the hook that caught her with, I suppose, and then she met me and God help her. We were together for 10 years and only her passing separated us.

“I do miss her terribly still, I don’t think we ever really move on, I think we move forward. I still carry a lot of what she does with me. I mean, she’s still got work to do.

“Not too long before she died, she started writing music with Moyra Fraser, Mick Foster’s wife. And the song that Mick and Tony (Allen) brought out last year, ‘The Mullingar Fleadh’ – the lyrics were written by Brigid, the music was written Moyra. She had also written another song which I knew nothing about, which was entered into the Westmeath fleadh and won that, the Leinster fleadh and won that, and was entered into the all-Ireland, but didn’t place. But I still maintain that she’s still got work to do.

“Myself and Moyra have set up a little production company, and are filming some of her poetry as well. She had files and files of written pieces. We had set up a Facebook page called Create Castlepollard and there was a few little films on there as well, comedy shorts and that sort of thing.

“I do feel my time was cut short with her, but I celebrate the time I had with her. She had an epic impact on my life, and I would rather have had those 10 years with her than without.

“I think grief-wise I mourned, I absolutely mourned, but there was an emptiness at the end of that. I don’t think I had a structure, I hadn’t built a structure for me to get out of it and say ‘these are your next steps’. And I still maintain that the podcast was Brigid’s gift to me, her saying ‘you’ll get through this but this is how you’ll get through it’.

• donmortell@gmail.com.

• MullingART is on most podcast platforms – Apple, Spotify, TuneIn, Google Podcasts.