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Meet I'm a child of the 50s who went off to Notre Dame to worship Football. Before I knew it I was married and working as an Art Director at a big Advertising Agency in their Phila., New York and Chicago offices. After seven years, while working in the Chicago office, I threw it all away to come home to Phila. and open my own tiny ad agency. A few years later, I finally got a real job in Kansas City as a Creative Director at Hallmark Cards. By now I was a single parent, and I dragged my five children, kicking and screaming, all the way to Kansas. After eight good years (regular paychecks) I threw it all away again. The very day I resigned, I met my future wife, Karen, who had been hoping I could get her a job at Hallmark. A year later we married and a month after the wedding we moved back East to the tiny, bucolic Borough of Narberth in the Phila. suburbs. There, while Karen trudged off to work each day, and the new step-brothers, Ted and Terry, went off to high school, I sat in my converted garage/studio in sandals, tee-shirt and shorts and designed, illustrated and wrote humor books. In 1987, I started doing op-ed art for the Inquirer and ten years later, I came up with the idea of delivering op-ed art to newspapers via the Internet: NewsArt.com. Then everything changed! In 1998, after a magical first visit to Ireland, I began painting for the first time since college. Ireland captured me... and I've been painting the Irish people, animals, and green patchwork quilt countryside ever since. I've even tried to capture her mystical nature as well, and it's the rare year that doesn't include magic time in Ireland. I come from a family of artists going back four generations. Three of my six wonderful children are artists, a fourth is a musician, the fifth a writer, and the sixth actually has a job. You can see a lot of Maguire family art, including work by my mother and grandparents, at www.maguiregallery.com. I have published a few essays and my local commentary, "The Burro of Narberth," is posted from time to time on the community bulletin board at the Narberth train station. I am not the Barry McGuire who sang "Eve of Destruction." Neither am I the McGwire who hit 70 homeruns, nor the Barry who hit 700, (and I've never used steroids either). Although I met my talented wife, Karen, in Kansas City, she's originally from Lubbock, Texas. Karen is a freelance editor, indexer, and a compiler of Day-at-a-Glance calendars. She's worked on books and calendars for such luminaries as Dear Abby, Dr. Ruth, Dave Barry, and Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers. Because she also does the index each year for Roger Ebert's annual movie review book, she is annoyingly knowledgeable about movies. She sings like an angel, plays piano and bass guitar, and has beautiful feet.
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