Cliff Notes Edgar Lee Masters

From Scotland, with love, to Blue Bell. Father, lost at sea ...

Retired business executive Mike Muir (aka Mike Byrne) and screenplay writer brings to his painting the same high level of energy and wide-ranging interests that characterized his career in business and everything else he has undertaken. His debut exhibition, at the Manayunk Roxborough Art Center (MRAC), is titled “Eclectic Inspirations” and will feature at least 24 of his oil paintings. The opening reception for this show will be Sunday, March 6, noon to 3 p.m. The gallery is located at 419 Green Lane (rear) in Manayunk. Muir’s studio, packed with nearly 300 finished works, is testimony to his diligence and passion for visual art. Although there is a continuity of style in his landscapes and portraits, his generous canvasses — 2’ X 3’ or larger — vary greatly in subject, coloration and texture.

Several of Muir’s works recall his childhood in “Bonny Dundee,” Scotland. In his “Scottish Lighthouse” paintings, the beacons rise atop forbidding cliffs and contain oblique autobiographical references. When Muir, now 67, was only a few months old, during World War II, his 24-year-old father was lost at sea. His British Navy destroyer, the HMS Mahratta, was sunk by U990, a German submarine operating with the “Werewolf” wolf-pack group in the North Sea, the hazardous body of water by which Dundee is located. Muir attributes some of his gifts for visual art and the written word to his father, who was also an artist and whose wartime letters to his family were eloquently composed and moving. He honors his father’s memory by using his name — Byrne — to sign his paintings.

From his boyhood, Muir — who believes he is not related to John Muir, the “father of the environmental movement” who was also born in Scotland —  remembers “sitting in my grandfather’s armchair drawing pictures of horses and trains.” Although he only began painting in the last 10 years or so, he has been drawing all of his life and has bound volumes of over 1100 of his pen and ink works. He has not studied art formally, but a lifetime of practice in drawing has more than compensated for this, as his ease with the human figure demonstrates.

“Tea Grannies,” for example, exemplifies this fluency; depicting a group of six colorfully dressed, elderly ladies seated closely together, conversing or sipping from their saucers. The image of women, gathered for tea, is a natural subject for an artist who grew up with eight maternal aunts, some of them not that much older than himself. He fondly remembers living with his grandmother in the mid- and late-1940s and that she sometimes “read the tea leaves.

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