> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.dublininquirer.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Brushing Up: The geometric petlife stuck up around the city - URL: https://www.dublininquirer.com/brushing-up-the-geometric-petlife-stuck-up-around-the-city/ - Published: 2026-09-08T23:06:24.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-08T23:06:24.000Z - Description: In these times, it's something to give people a “nice little pep” as they set out to overcome a new day, said Magnus Mudrack. - Author: Shamim Malekmian - Tags: street art, Brushing Up, Culture Desk Stuck on a utility box on Constitution Hill is a poster with simple lines in orange and blue. They trace the face of a giddy dog. Here is that pooch again pasted on a post box on Nassau Street. There's another on College Street – the dog's ears are triangles, its face two rhombuses – on the boarded-up window of the old Irish Yeast Co. A cat drawn, made of similar geometric shapes, stares down passersby on a bustling Grafton Street. On the shelf of a desk inside an old building on leafy North Circular Road sits a fat stack of those cat and dog prints. The desk is inside the home studio of Magnus Mudrack. He draws the pictures with a dabber – the kind of markers people use to play bingo, he said. He always uses just two colours, Mudrack said. On a recent morning, he wore a black jacket over a yellow shirt and brown pinstripe trousers. He’s tall with a serious face with a beard, greying in some places. The origins of the pet portraits now found around the city go back about eight years ago, said Mudrack, as he pored over long-ago sketchbooks. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/9f/78/9f782dda-9dc9-44d1-b817-fe80588bdc76/content/images/2026/09/On-College-Street.-Photo-Shamim-Malekmian.jpg) On College Street. Photo by Shamim Malekmian. In 2018, he filled a whole sketchpad with geometrical birds just out of an ache to draw, he said. At the time, he was hustling to set up his graphic design studio and running exhibitions, he said. “I was doing a lot of logistical stuff, and I wasn’t doing much image making”. He yearned for old-school drawing, he said. Later, he moved on from birds to simple portraits of real-life dogs and cats, he said. As a former graffiti kid, he shared them with all Dubliners, said Mudrack. He loves it if it gives people a “nice little pep” as they set out to overcome a new day, said Mudrack. “And they’re curious, like ‘What the fuck is that about?’” But it is also a “fun little game” that colours his own life, said Mudrack. “Like I go to the shop from here and back, then I go for a run three times a week. Then I go to the market. And that’s it,” he said. It can get lonely, Mudrack said. ## **The people’s art** The simple geometry of his pet portraits is a nod to mid-20th century modernist cartoon illustrations, said Mudrack. Think *Top Cat* or *The Pink Panther.* He walked over to a jammed bookshelf in the corner of his studio and picked up a giant book. It’s filled with hand-drawn cartoons in that style. He paged through it, pausing on a pencil-drawn illustration of a smiley army general with a rhombus-shaped head, eyes closed and mouth open, and one hand thrown up in the air as if caught mid-speech. “Jesus fucking Christ, look at that, that’s amazing,” he said. Mudrack grew up in the Dublin 7 area on social assistance and felt worthless a lot, he said. As a teenager, he took shelter in painting graffiti in Dublin. He was good at it, which gave him a reason to feel proud, said Mudrack. He met graffiti OGs he looked up to in jam sessions up in Drogheda and felt star-struck, he said. “Jesus Christ, it was great. It was going from being shit at everything – particularly in school – to being patted on the back by the people who you not just admired, but worshipped,” said Mudrack. Now that he’s older, Mudrack – who is 40 – has outgrown his roots, he said. He wouldn't class his pet portraits as street art either because that’s often political. His project isn't, Mudrack said. Still, he has fun reading other people’s political slogans whenever they appear on the posters though, he said. On Basin Lane, at the former site of a anti-immigrant encampment, someone has spray-painted Mudrack’s name “Magnus” in black, all over one of his pooch prints, covering the dog’s face except for the circular nose. “D8 says no” – an anti-immigrant slogan – is scribbled underneath it. Mudrack laughed when he heard about it. Over time, he's grown stoic about the fact that these things are out of his control, he said. “If you wanna put something on the street, it’s not yours anymore; it can get drawn over, picked at,” Mudrack said. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/9f/78/9f782dda-9dc9-44d1-b817-fe80588bdc76/content/images/2026/09/On-Grafton-Street.-Photo-by-Shamim-Malekmian-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/9f/78/9f782dda-9dc9-44d1-b817-fe80588bdc76/content/images/2026/09/On-Nassau-Street.-Photo-by-Shamim-Malekmian.jpg) On Grafton Street; On Nassau Street. Photos by Shamim Malekmian. His unauthorised stickers could land him in trouble with property owners and the city, he said. But if someone asks him to take a poster down, he always does. Though it's rare, he said. “There’s almost no people who hate it,” Mudrack said. Paddy Peyton delights in catching sight of these posters whenever they crop up as he strolls through the city, he said recently. “I enjoy how simple and creative they are.” They sprinkle colour onto the city and perk him up, said Peyton. “They always catch my eyes." Mudrack says that what he really hopes is that people who grapple with homelessness and addiction feel a touch of comfort when they spot them around. People who can’t afford art, he said. As he recalled, sat on a sofa on his home-studio, an encounter with someone struggling who liked his project, Mudrack began to cry. He'd felt she was terribly alone, he said. ## **Back to basics** Now people commission him to draw their pets' portraits in the same minimal clean style. “Models wanted. Illustrator seeks pretty pooches, meandering mutts, bounding bowwows, for drawing project,” says a large poster in Mudrack’s home studio. “To enter, tag @magnus\_mudrack in a picture of your pooch along with a story about their antics. Win: Pooch print.” The dog on the poster has a circle for a face, triangles as ears and half a square for a muzzle. In the age of AI spit-outs, Mudrack finds reprieve in back-to-basics drawing, a style that’s fading fast, he said. “The kind of very naive style of things.” It feels zany and cool, he said. “Like how does it make sense, how does this look like a dog, it’s just a triangle and a square.” He had felt like that during pandemic lockdowns too, when there weren't many cars to roar by and blot out the “birds and the insects and the crickets and the gravel going down the tyre of a bicycle”, said Mudrack. Stripping things down can be cathartic right now, he said. “We’re living in the middle of a tumultuous time, and if I can bring some joy and some happiness, a little respite," he said, "then, yeah, be nice.”