Napier artist Mike Lloyd has made an appeal to locate 40 stolen drawings. Photo / Warren Buckland
Napier artist Mike Lloyd has made an appeal to locate 40 stolen drawings. Photo / Warren Buckland
A Napier artist has made a heartfelt plea for 40 of his stolen artworks - which took him more than 500 hours to sketch - to be returned, no questions asked.
Retired engineer Mike Lloyd, 89, has been sketching buildings and boats around Hawke’s Bay for decades and spends about two and a half days on each drawing.
A large folder with 40 of his impressive artworks went missing from his parked car outside VTNZ Hastings early afternoon last Thursday (September 26).
He was inside the VTNZ building making inquiries about a driver’s licence test at the time, and said he returned to his unlocked car to find the passenger door open.
Lloyd said it was not until later that “the penny dropped” and he realised his folder full of art had been nicked.
“It’s [full] of recent drawings that I’ve done - I do a lot of boats and a lot of houses.
“It would have taken between 500 and 600 hours to do the lot. That is what kills me.”
The large folder has a drawing of Napier building The Dome (also known as the T&G Building) on the front cover, and Lloyd said he was not concerned about getting someone in trouble, he just wanted the drawings back.
The drawing on the front cover of the stolen folder. Photo / Gary Hamilton-Irvine
“I suspect someone did it on the spur of the moment, or maybe had thought about it, but now they have them they don’t know what to do with them,” he said, adding they would not be able to sell the art.
He encouraged someone to drop them into a police station or even slide them under a door at VTNZ Hastings.
Lloyd is sometimes commissioned to do drawings but keeps most of his sketches simply because he loves doing them.
He has not been able to sketch since the incident, which is unusual as he generally sketches every day.
“They are like a baby to me,” he said, of his work.
He is not holding his breath about the outcome but wanted to make a public appeal to try to recover them.
“I do have a certain amount of faith in human nature.”
A police spokesman said they received a report of a theft from a vehicle on Orchard Rd in Camberley, Hastings, on September 26.
“If you locate a folder with sketches/drawings inside, please bring it into the Hastings Police Station so we can reunite it with its rightful owner,” the spokesman said.
You can also contact Lloyd directly on 022 077 5005 who said, in hindsight, he should have locked his vehicle.
Gary Hamilton-Irvine is a Hawke’s Bay-based reporter who covers a range of news topics including business, councils, breaking news and cyclone recovery. He formerly worked at News Corp Australia.
