Jackie Orszaczky remembered

Jackie Orszaczky,
Watercolour on Arches paper, 76 x 56 cm

Today I found Jackie Orszaczky on YouTube. I have been playing the clips and remembering Tuesday nights at the Rose of Australia in Erskineville in 1984. I was there most Tuesdays listening to him and sketching. As well as being a wonderful musician and very cool dude, Jackie was a really nice man. When I looked for sponsors for a show of my sketches I searched to see who sponsored Jackie and discovered that instead of being sponsored he was himself a sponsor of Matthew Talbot society for homeless men.

When I entered this portrait in a competition and had to get him to sign a form saying he had actually sat for me, he read the form in amongst the beer decals at the pub and said 'But I have been sitting for you all year!' (as recounted in Blue Tulips). I am not in the video below but I was probably there watching and painting. In his native Hungary he got audiences of thirty thousand people.

Jackie died in 2008 aged 59.