Background
He was born in the Newcastle, New South Wales suburb of Merewether.
He was born in the Newcastle, New South Wales suburb of Merewether.
During the late fifties/early sixties Molvig held weekly, very informal, life drawing classes which were central to the Brisbane art scene at the time, and he was mentor to various emerging artists such as John Aland, Andrew Sibley, Gordon Shepherdson, Mervyn Moriarty, Joy Roggenkamp and many others His powerful self-portrait is part of the Queensland Art Gallery collection. Molvig"s talent came to the fore in 1958/59 when he painted the "Centralian" series after travelling through central Australia - incorporating Australian Aboriginal symbolism in his own interpretation of the Australian landscape.
Molvig was an emotional and intuitive painter, deeply concerned with humanity and its follies and always invented symbols and a particular "style" to suit the criteria of the subject he was painting.
Later the "Pale Nudes" series (1964) once again show the influence Australian Aboriginal art had on him, and this symbolism was further distilled in the "Tree of Manitoba" series (1968), painted when he was seriously ill and perhaps already had a sense of his own mortality. Molvig was a rare human being - gregarious and straight forward, often too brutally honest for his own good and unable to abide stupidity, but with a gift of true compassion and understanding and gentleness to all living things, including the human race with all its imperfections and this is evident in his work.
Molvig died in Princess Alexandra Hospital, South Brisbane, Queensland after an unsuccessful kidney transplant.