Michael Maloney became a docker instead of an artist. Now he is having a second chance, finds JANE O'CONNELL

As a boy, Michael Maloney was happiest when he was drawing and painting.

Art, however, wasn't considered as a career option at the comprehensive he attended.

No, his teachers told him, a job in an office would be more suitable. After all, the art world was too competitive to make a living.

That he took their advice and didn't go to art college is a source of eternal regret to this former docker, even at the age of 37.

But despite having no formal training, there is no doubting his talent for painting murals.

The walls of daughter Rachael's bedroom are testament to his penchant for taking well-known cartoon characters and placing them in a setting which comes entirely from his own imagination.

He can also paint furniture, either using traditional nursery or cartoon characters, or create special finishes. Now, of course, his talents aren't confined to the walls of his own home. From £40, Michael will be happy to draw all over your nursery's walls too.

Michael, of Perry Road, Benfleet, admits the hours fly by once he starts on a project.

The characters are carefully copied, the background mapped out to his taste, and then it's time to work, using either acrylics or oils.

His love of creating things also extends to decorating Faberge eggs, a hobby normally associated more with fifty-something women with plenty of time on their hands than thirty-something dockers.

Michael's love of art is in stark contrast to the years he has spent doing jobs his heart was not in.

Armed with his five O-levels, Michael therefore left school at the age of 16 and spent the next five years working as a clerk at Customs and Excise in London.

"It did my head in," the father-of-one recalls. "It was so boring."

After five years, unable to bear pen-pushing one second more, he quit to work as a postman. Shiftwork gave him more time to paint.

Then, seduced by the prospect of good money to be earned at the docks at Dartford in Kent, Michael got a job through his father, who had been a docker all his life.

He was made redundant, but still works shifts there in the car control office, guiding vehicles on and off the ships.

But he hopes that by beginning a second career as an artist, he will finally be able to fulfil his potential.

His employers contributed towards the cost of him attending an animation course at the prestigious St Martin's School of Art in London, and his dream is to one day be able make a full-time living from his passion.

"As a kid, I loved painting and drawing and by the time I was at secondary school I knew that's what I wanted to do," says Michael, a shy, rather diffident man who is clearly ill at ease talking about himself.

"But the teachers never gave me any encouragement and I was one of those kids who never really knew what they wanted to do.

"You were expected to go and work in an office, really. I went into the docks because it paid the bills."

Now he hopes he can paint himself a bright, new future.

(Right and left) Every picture tells a story - Michael Malony has gone back to his first love of drawing and painting to create enchanting nursery murals and furniture as well as more serious studies

Pictures: LUAN MARSHALL

Converted for the new archive on 19 November 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.