Quiet Moments Made Audible
Deirdre Murphy’s Gradients of Growth
Cindy Stockton Moore
Deirdre Murphy’s Gradients of Growth feature three concentric bodies of work –painting, printmaking and sculpture – grounded in observation and revolving around change. Each work emanates from a singular point – an experience of hyperlocal flora and fauna – and ripples outward, creating a wider spectrum of understanding and appreciation of the natural world. Deeply invested in collaborative scientific inquiry, Deirdre Murphy is an informed and responsive artist who celebrates the splendor of the landscape while simultaneously calling to attention its precarity.
The painting series at the core of this exhibition began during the artist’s residency at Shavers Creek Environmental Center. While exploring the site, she witnessed an abandoned cavity nest carved in a standing tree. The hole left behind formed a ready-made framing device, a portal to view the landscape from a fresh perspective. Through this organic aperture, Murphy refocuses the traditional en plein air painting – switching from the point of view of the painter to that of the bird – decentering the human narrator. This vantage shift is more than a pictorial strategy; in the light of the current climate crisis and species decline, it envisions a way forward, towards an ecology of hope.
Murphy’s ‘birds eye view’ is achieved not through distance, but through up-close, experiential empathy. The color is heightened. Bright and saturated ombre blends reflect liminal hours – sunset, sunrise, aurora borealis – and reference enhanced hue perception, the more-than-human color receptors allowing birds to perceive a wider spectrum of light. The power of Deirdre Murphy’s work lies in her ability to translate scientific knowledge to visual wonder, based in deep observation and renewed curiosity.
In the Contemporary Herbarium series, Murphy utilizes the centuries-old Renaissance botanical technique of pressing and indexing plant specimens. Updated in vibrant hues, the works on paper are arranged in Newton’s nine-step prismatic scale, an unwoven rainbow of ROYGBIV. Historical herbaria – like the Trembley Collection at Lehigh University – are used by climate change scientists to track changes in environment; they can detect decline in biodiversity and measure the health of regional species. The artist’s version of this paper garden uses a direct monoprinting technique to capture hyperlocal, East Coast pollinator species. These recognizable – but often-overlooked – plants sustain migratory birds on their travels. The samples used in the series were grown in Murphy’s own garden, where she is modeling the potential for positive environmental impact on the personal level. In Contemporary Herbarium, Murphy employs unexpected color, direct one-to-one scale, and delicate chine collé printmaking techniques to attract our attention – hand-crafting beautiful invitations to realizable change.
Punctuating the gallery space with three-dimensional color, the artists’ latest series of sculptural nests are further evidence of quiet, collective change. Created with a time-consuming porcelain slip-casting method, the delicate forms are made directly from abandoned nests; the woven twigs – assembled first by birds – are burned away in the process of ceramic firing, leaving only a hollow shell. Some of the original nests – now ghosts in the small ‘confections of color’ – were gathered by Murphy outside of her wooded studio, a sustained, mutually beneficial residency with Lower Merion Conservancy. Other nests were brought to her by neighbors and friends. This unseen network of collaboration – with the birds, with the community – widens the conversation about shared habitat and resources; it works against a world-view of scarcity and towards a vision of mutual stewardship and connection. In Deirdre Murphy’s Gradients of Growth, we experience an expanded spectrum of care, rooted in the joy and wonder of the natural world.
“Next Alchemy” Exhibition 2023
Essay by Cynthia Haveson Veloric PhD
Art Historian and Independent Curator
On viewing Deirdre Murphy’s new series Nest Alchemy, one feels almost an electric charge. This experience is not accidental. The crossed wiry lines that create birds’ nests in many of the paintings mimic neuron cells in our brain, thus making an immediate, if not conscious connection between us and the birds’ creative fury. Murphy has been studying such connections, beginning with the drawings of neurons by Ramon y Cajal, the father of modern-day neuroscience. She enhanced her knowledge of such an obscure science by attending lectures on neuroanatomy and working in biology labs. In her paintings Murphy seems to be asserting that we are closer biologically to these clever creatures than we formerly assumed.
Bird nests are used and then abandoned, despite the fact that they are engineering marvels. Nest building was historically assumed to be an intuitive process, genetically predetermined. Newer evidence suggests that the bird’s ability to determine which materials to use, where to place them, and how to ensure its efficacy in protecting the eggs must be based on memory and learning. Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk, writes, “In my own history of the countryside, nests weren’t things that were made to be found.” Murphy challenges the notion of leaving nests unseen by extolling their intricacies and turning them into icons of a disappearing species. This mission was inspired by a residency at Shaver's Creek Environmental Center in the summer of 2022.
Murphy’s mastery of the craft of painting, her endless field studies, and her persistence to work through weather and landscape challenges, mimic the tireless efforts of birds to simply exist in the Anthropocene. As the birds weave their nests one tiny twig and scrap of natural minutia at a time, so too does Murphy amplify each individual stroke by using grand gestures and flamboyant color. The vivid color is both symbolic and seasonal—orange, psychologically associated with positivity, also references global warming; the green speaks of rebirth and spring, the red berries assert themselves visually against the pale teal winter sky, reminding us that Mother Nature will pursue her course in spite of our altered seasons. But the color also departs from realism for purely expressive purposes. For example, the blue-black Night Watch seems lit from an artificial source which renders it otherworldly and mysterious, akin to Van Gogh’s Starry Night.
Unlike scientific bird illustration which is static and based on the human hierarchical gaze, Murphy captures the energy of birds and their habitats up close and personal. In a series of nature studies done en plein air, she transposes the gaze yet again by painting what a bird might see through the portal of a decayed tree. Do they see and feel through a climate changed lens as we humans do?
In order to halt further human destruction of the natural world we must remove the imagined divisions between human and non-human species. Murphy aids us in this effort by luring us into bird habitats through arresting color and dynamic brushwork. Once focused on the complexities inherent in these little but mighty structures, we ponder the ingenuity of birds and wonder if perhaps they have something to teach us.
"Threshold" Exhibition 2020
Elizabeth Lee, Associate Professor of Art History
Dickinson College
Deirdre Murphy’s latest body of work is knit together by the concept of a threshold, which can be defined as the start of something new or can signal the point at which a certain effect is produced. These paintings do both.
In the Oculus series, we are transported into galaxies dusted with constellations of stars and inhabited by suspended planetary orbs. Deep space is interrupted by horizontal strips of marbleized gray patterns, suggesting aerial maps of painterly landscapes witnessed from above. At times, as in Blue Oculus, Chinese Landscape, these bands not only intersect but merge with their adjacent planets whose edges fade and dissolve. A closer look reveals this planetary surface is not covered by the earth’s familiar continental contours, but by an ancient Chinese landscape. A giant green Luna moth hovers along the planetary rim, distorting the viewer’s sense of scale and reminding us this is not the world we thought we knew. Murphy’s layering of familiar forms made strange resonates with John Yau’s provocation of “the radical possibility of seeing what is in front of you.” Sometimes seeing is easiest when reality shifts just enough to invite the viewer in for a closer look as these Oculus paintings do, inviting us in to observe our surroundings. They serve as thresholds insofar as they take us somewhere new, while also challenging us to heighten our perception, to really notice and pay attention to what we see.
While roughly half the works in the show bear witness to this macroscopic universe, the rest are firmly rooted in the earth and Murphy’s longstanding commitment to plein-air painting. This is plein-air painting with a difference, though: rather than reflecting the artist’s immersion in an open-air environment, they picture nature through a portal, either in the format of a lens or storm culvert. By inserting an artificial structure between the viewer and nature, they challenge a metaphor in place since the Renaissance in which painting is conceived as an unmediated window onto the world. Murphy instead frames nature, making us aware of the act of looking and the devices through which we see. This is entirely appropriate for paintings created during a pandemic in which even access to nature is conditioned by socially-distanced protocols. They speak to a reality in which movement across a seemingly simple threshold can feel perpetually beyond reach.
Despite these limitations, the pandemic has allowed for certain insights. The Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy notes that historically pandemics have forced a break with the past to reimagine how we live. They usher us into another world, inviting us to look with fresh eyes at what is before us and to reconsider our place within the larger universe. View Site
This is also what Murphy does: using terrestrial and planetary portals, she opens up rich and vibrant worlds. Despite differences in appearance, these works are linked through the repeated motif of the circle, which suggests the cyclical nature of life with its ceaseless change and unending process of growth.
“Oculus” Exhibition Essay
Chief Curator, George Kinghorn
Zillman Art Museum | 2020
Oculus showcases a series of paintings by Deirdre Murphy along with wall- based sculptures made in collaboration with her husband, artist Scott White. Murphy approaches her work with an awareness of her existence as both a minuscule and integral part of a larger whole. The artist examines relationships between art and scientific discovery, particularly illustrating interconnected patterns on both a micro and macro level. Murphy’s first-hand interactions and collaborations with scientists continue to inform her studio practice. In the triptych Phosphorescence, her circular compositions draw a parallel to the petri dishes used by scientists to examine the cellular structures of specimens under the microscope. Oculus Minor, a six panel compositions, contrasts with the artist’s painting from lab observations as the work addresses light on a macroscopic level. This painting poses a mirrored likeness between illuminated, aerial images of light pollution, and a fading blanket of constellations in the celestial sphere. Murphy expresses how her use of molecular structures and flight patterns become “a language to describe my relationship to nature and… the inter-connected quality in our lives, thus illuminating a path to seeing the world anew.”
In a collaborative series of sculptures with Scott White, the artists inspire a dialogue relating to how light pollution and climate change impact the migratory patterns of songbirds that rely on stars for navigation. White explains, “these works are meant to re-contextualize the phenomenological events we see in the night sky.” Hand-formed out of steel and aluminum, Ursa Major is a smooth, convex dome intensely lit from behind by colored LEDs. The work reveals a captivating collection of star systems painstakingly created by piercing through the metal surface. In contrast, the facade of Star Clusters is broken into carefully welded facets, allowing light to pass through a deliberate array of junctions
Navigating Deirdre Murphy’s Oculus at Esther Klein Gallery
Cindy Stockton Moore | 2019
At the center of Deirdre Murphy’s solo exhibition Oculus, is a cluster of small paintings on panel; this grouping of loosely representational studies shows the range of her research into biological patterns. Many of the highly-chromatic, painterly compositions visually reference the title of the show — using a repeated round shape as a formal structure to circumscribe her organic imagery. The title Oculus also refers to the shape of a lens, found in a microscope or telescope the artist uses to observe nature. Likewise, an oculus can be an aperture, an opening to the sky. In ancient temples, an oculus not only brought light into a dome, illuminating the architecture within, it also allowed worshippers to contemplate the heavens above.
Deirdre Murphy invites simultaneous readings, overlaying seemingly binary modes: micro/macro, inside/out, night/day, natural/man-made. Throughout the recent work in Oculus – which consists of acrylic paintings, mixed media and collaborative sculpture– there is a structural thread: naturalistic elements are paired with patterns of visualized data. The artwork remains fresh and responsive; it is clearly informed by scientific data but not driven by it.
The well-paced exhibition at Esther Klein Gallery is at once a culmination and expansion of Deirdre Murphy’s three-month BioArt Residency. Although she has worked with scientists before, the residency at Integral Molecular was the first time Murphy worked within a lab. In a white coat, gloved and goggled, the artist set up her paints next to scientists studying virus behavior on a cellular level. As the scientists shared images, Murphy would simultaneously capture them with water-based media. She explains the parallel research: “scientists and artists are both keen observers of the natural world, but their processes and what they are looking for is completely different.”
During her time in the lab, Murphy worked with an experimental mindset; the results are apparent in several of her Lab Studies, smaller paintings on panel in which the glow of protein biomarkers are captured in loose pools of saturated color. Since the conclusion of her BioArt Residency in 2018, Murphy has continued to study and refine this body of work, incorporating data from previous and on-going research.
The artist is acute observer of formal patterns, finding visual correlations in cell migration, light pollution, avian flight patterns, and the matrix of the night sky. In Oculus, the geometry of constellations is elegantly captured in a pair of illuminated, aluminum sculptures that Murphy created with her husband, Scott White. In the hue-shifting, planar wall sculptures, each star is rendered as a pin-prick of colored light, recreating the firmament through delicately perforated metal.
As humans, we have long used stars to navigate, to find our way in the largeness of the world. The artist reminds us that we are not alone in that pursuit; song birds base their flight routes on the night sky. And while the distant stars seem beyond our reach, they are not; our actions affect change. In a nearby series of paintings, floating rectangles of color depict clusters of light pollution that –among other things– disrupt animal migrations.
Luna Moth is a small, quiet painting. In it, an etherial, lime-green moth is painted life-size, set against a circle of the night sky. Here, the inherent beauty of the natural world is shown in its delicacy. A nocturnal flier, the luna moth is also adversely affected by light pollution. Since its lifespan is so short (and it is not active in the daylight,) the moth is a rare gift to observe. Deirdre Murphy’s painting offers a shared moment of awe but also of ecological responsibility. In the context of the exhibition, the circle of sky behind the luminous insect could read as the whole planet or a single petri dish. By shifting our perspective – from micro to macro and back again – Deirdre Murphy allows us to recalibrate our position to the natural world, illuminating the interdependence of life, and our minute but fateful impact on the planet.
“Winds of Change” Catalogue
Margaret Winslow, Associate Curator for Contemporary Art, Delaware Art Museum | 2015
“Not less important are the observers of the birds than the birds themselves.”
—Henry David Thoreau from Journal X, March 20, 1858
In her most recent body of work, on view in Winds of Change, Deirdre Murphy has embarked on a fresh scientific exploration of the flora and fauna that have inhabited her canvases for years. In August 2015, Murphy spent the first week of a year-long artist residency at the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Kempton, Pennsylvania. The Sanctuary was incorporated in 1938 as the world’s first refuge for birds of prey and as such is an important preserve for the research and conservation of falcons, ospreys, hawks, eagles, vultures, and owls. While there, Murphy fueled her interest in these creatures—obtaining data on migratory routes—and observed the quiet passage of time. Murphy’s fascination with spontaneous and deliberate movements—murmuration and migration—of birds, the relationships between stars in the sky, the construction of a flower, and the structural engineering of power lines inspire her investigations of the natural and constructed world around her.
Murphy is a keen observer of the relationships between the micro and the macro, those points in space that align travel routes to constellations and flight trajectories to wind currents. She approaches this interest with the attentiveness of a scientist, observing, researching, and tracking changes. The shifts that occur—the effects of global warming on raptor migration—are noted but not critiqued, and similarly the industrial patterning created across a morning sky is handled with care and precision devoid of appraisal. Murphy’s paintings link nature’s aesthetics in a manner similar to how a social graph makes users aware of their interconnectedness; the formal similarities are emphasized for the viewer’s contemplation.
Beginning in 2014 with her painting, Seasonal Passage, Murphy incorporated a new formal device to highlight the voids—the interstellar medium— she observes. In this canvas, the artist connects the points between flocking birds, creating polygons that accentuate the mass of clusters moving through the sky. The resulting shape—informed in part by an encounter with Robert Goodnough’s Dark Blue Cluster (1979, Delaware Art Museum)—is further developed in Murphy’s current body of work. The triangles populating Chatter double as both a flock of birds noisily gathered in the trees and the foliage itself in which the birds are nestled. Dawn finds the flock waiting to alight on a telephone wire. In Dreaming of Achill, the floating forms no longer retain a strict correlation to birds and instead can be read as the depiction of wind sweeping over the Irish island.
Murphy also utilizes the bird as a means through which to enter the canvas. Fascinated by Japanese scroll painting, the artist constructs multiple vantage points throughout her compositions. The formal elements—the horizon line, migratory routes, perched birds, and swarming shapes—guide the viewer through the painting from shallow depths in the foreground to infinite spaces beyond. Murphy’s formal means are accentuated by her interest in color theory, and use of complementary hues, as well as variation in mark making between hard-edge shapes and hand-drawn, circuitous lines. Through observing such differences, one is able to take flight through the canvas. Ultimately Murphy’s paintings make visible the wonder of time. Her Fall Migration and Spring Migration mark the passage of hours through the slow advance of pokeweed shadows across the panel’s surface—the shifts in daylight and continuity of perpetual routines. In the exhibition’s title work, Winds of Change, time is suspended among swirling leaves or a gust of wind, held in a moment between action and stasis. Murphy’s canvases capture that tenuous point where journeys past shift to trajectories forward.
"Artifice" Catalogue Essay
Curator, Matt Singer | 2008
For a bird, a tree-limb is a perch — a landing between earth and sky, a setting for rest and observation in an existence defined by airborne arrivals and departures, respite and reconnaissance in a migratory life. Outfitted with a nest, this same tree-limb blossoms into an aviary home — a locus for life with a mate and the cycle of bearing and nurturing young.
Emily Dickinson famously wrote “Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul/And sings the tune without the words/And never stops at all. ” Deirdre Murphy, too, finds promise on the wing. She envies birds their freedom of movement — their “mastery of the air”; their ability to see from widely and wildly divergent perspectives in spectrums of color beyond what is visible to humans; their capacity to change environment when biology or circumstance calls. She admires their matter-of-fact assimilation to man-made environments, and empathizes with them as they persevere and adapt in the face of man-made change.
Rootedness and flight. Home and escape. These are the dualities represented by birds — and the opposing states at the heart of so much existential yearning among humans. Murphy understands life on the move — born in New York City, her peripatetic childhood included formative periods in Paris, France and Manchester, England, as well as points north, south, east, and west across the United States. She’s experienced the pleasures and rewards of wanderlust — as a young adult, she expanded her personal and artistic vistas and experience with a year’s study and work in Japan — and continues to feel its allure. Murphy knows, as well, the drive to build, sustain, and commit to home and family. Since moving to Philadelphia in 1998, she’s married, had a child (Liam, now three), and made her corner of the city a base for life as a working artist and art-educator.
Like Murphy, her subjects — a ranging flock of birds as well as butterflies and one most arresting and arrested deer (more later about this Trickster) — are at home in Pennsylvania. They are native, indigenous, authentic to their locale. Like John James Audobon, Murphy begins by depicting her favored fauna amidst its local flora. Unlike Audobon, she then lets her imagination — and her painterly practice — take flight. Flowers morph into origami. Mountain ranges become A-frame houses become simple strips of folded paper. Her wildlife is vivid, vibrant — and strangely still. This stillness underscores the contrivances of traditional nature painting — Audobon shot his birds before painting them, using wire to prop them into “natural” positions — while staying true to the nature of Murphy’s actual models, most of which are taxidermy specimens of birds studied and sketched at Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences and stuffed deer (like the aforementioned Trickster) adorning the walls of Joe’s Bar in Ligonier, Pennsylvania.
Nothing is what it seems in Artifice. With the power unique to an accomplished painter, Murphy creates credible and thoroughly engaging worlds through the force of her talents. With the brave honesty that is the hallmark of a true artist, Murphy is unafraid to shatter the fantasies she’s conjured by reminding us that we are not looking at actual birds, butterflies, houses, and sunsets — that what she’s showing us are representations of these things rendered in paint on canvas.
Professedly “in love with the formal language of painting,” Murphy sets challenges and parameters for herself as she conceives each new work. She sets sight on taboos—that a figure should never be placed at the very center of a composition; that a picture of deer bounding against a sunset sky can only be kitsch — so she can overcome them. She places herself far out on a creative limb so she might reach someplace new, see something new —
always bringing the viewer with her. Murphy’s hope: to have the viewer join her in fully inhabiting the worlds presented in her paintings, then departing these imagined perches to a life of heightened awareness.
Eye to Eye: An Artist's Collaborative
Mark Brosseau, Deirdre Murphy, Kate Stewart, Scott White | 2007
The spirit of improvisation, problem-solving and spontaneity fueled this collaborative project in which three painters and two sculptors embarked on an experimental process in which the individual artist signature hand was transferred to the collective whole. These five artists were each given two pieces of paper, for a total of ten mixed-media drawings. Every two weeks we passed our drawing to another artist in a prescribed order, never to work on a drawing more than once, and always to work on the drawings at different stages in their development. The size, 10" x 10", is portable; the medium is open.
We named this collection as a revisited reference to a children’s game in which a sentence is whispered from one person to the next, usually to end up quite different by the time it reaches the end of the line. This children’s game is most commonly referred to as “Telephone” in the United States, but this same game has been played for over a century and is known by different names in at least thirty languages spoken around the world, from Macedonian to Japanese and Norwegian to Czech. We have chosen to adapt the name of this game in Turkish, Kulaktan kulağa, literally “from ear to ear.” In our case, our drawings were passed from eye to eye, continually modified and expanded by the subsequent artists who adapted and added to them. Whatever “vision” we each started out with was often completely revised and re-envisioned by the end. Any initial intentions or original concepts were altered by the next interpreter, who added new dimensions for the next artist, who would then build additional layers and twists on the work from before. We did not strategize together or collaboratively communicate ideas; the work had to speak for itself as it faced its next architect. Just as in the children’s game, perception is subjective and distinct to each individual, and each intended meaning will change as it filters through another, so that the end result is perhaps a drastically different incarnation from the original concept. This project forced us to relinquish control of our work and leave it to an unknown fate as we passed it on in trust to the next person. Conversely, we each faced the often challenging, mystifying, and problem-solving task of continuing the work presented before us.
The greatest challenge of all was for us to each successfully complete two of the drawings as the final artist in a sequence, integrating into a balanced whole the work of four previous artists in multiple media, without verbal communication with each other, without having viewed the work in any of its previous stages, and to resolve it in a manner that resonated as a complete, cohesive piece without undoing the individuality of each contributor. We believe that through our observation of each work’s evolution, through the tasks of linking disparate artistic elements into a united whole, and through the risk-taking aspect of acquiescing our work – without oversight – to another artist, we have each enhanced our solo practices in furthered introspection and fearless boldness.
This project perpetuates a rich tradition of artist collaboration from the Exquisite Corpse of the Surrealist movement, to the collaborative paintings of Warhol and Basquiat, to the current collaborations of TEAM Shag and the Royal Art Lodge. Through this work, we explored our individual identities as artists and the critical thinking and strategy of working through to a satisfying resolution when presented with an artistic challenge. We hope this work demonstrates the power of the individual, the evolution of a concept, the unexpected surprises in the creative process, and the uniting force – through visual problem-solving – that transforms the disconnected into a collective whole without sacrificing diversity.
Deirdre Murphy: Recent Paintings
Lily Wei, Curator & Art Critic | 2006
Deirdre Murphy’s mostly small, mostly square panels and canvases of vivid, celebratory colors and patterned images blend the constructed and the natural, the art historical and the personal, the fictive and the real in ways that are both festive and poignant. They are distillations of ambiance and mood as Murphy layers and weaves together images of past and present, the commonplace and the exotic, the geometric and the organic in psychologically dense, visually complex orchestrations. Cerulean Warbler, for instance, depicts an elegant blue bird framed by stylized flora and geometric ellipses in hothouse shades that are both brilliant and pale. The bird—a relative of the Emperor’s nightingale, perhaps—is positioned in the foreground while the background drops quickly back to depict a distant Chinese landscape crossed by thin red lines that refer to ancient mappings and migratory routes. The lovely Flower Cloud is filled by several crisply delineated bouquets and ribbons, based on the designs of a kimono, that explode like fireworks, lighting up the Chinese hillside below in a burst of flowers. A building nestled into the hill (Zhang Xin’s Commune Hotel) reflects Frank Lloyd Wright’s principles of integrating architecture into the environment and reiterates one of Murphy’s constant themes: the multi-faceted, intricate relationship between man and nature. Font Hill enlarges the architectural context, presenting a precipitously angled structure (a landmark factory in Bucks Country, Pennsylvania) that reminded the artist of a medieval or Renaissance cloister while the composition of Font Hill is based on a Francesco D’Antonio [is it a painting or fresco?] from 1425. Underlining the identity of painting as a fictive enterprise, instead of real birds, there are origami ones and instead of sky, there are sections of a colorful, pixel-like checkerboard. Her Majesty features a stately ocean liner dry-docked in Philadelphia and evokes a vanished era and immigrant sagas. The vessel, as steeply foreshortened as the factory in Font Hill or as abruptly disproportionate as foreground and background in Cerulean Warbler, is distorted, as space is in all of Murphy’s paintings, reconfigured by imaginative, revisionist memory. The boat also appears to be advancing onto the highway in the foreground as if pointing toward the future and an ongoing journey, offering a narrative of departures that poses questions about home, history, loss and recuperation.
"Bliss of Growth" Catalogue Essay
Essay by Matt Freedman | 2003
Every painting in Deirdre Murphy’s exhibition “The Bliss of Growth,” makes vividly clear the aptness of her title. The phrase, taken from a sanskrit poem, reflects the ecstatic and energetic relationship the artist seeks with her work, but also refers to the rapid evolution of themes in the
paintings themselves. Each is a finely wrought template of experimental gestures, a laboratory of risky choices. The choices are not random, rather they are directed by the artist’s fascination with patterning as it is found both in nature and in design; in culture.
Murphy utilizes a number of strategic approaches to bring “natural” and “cultural” images together; juxtaposing, layering, compressing. She works with a clear conceptual strategy, but her choices are highly intuitive. The paintings are gorgeous, but more than that, they force us to contemplate the terminally ambivalent relationship we hold with the environment around us. We seek to understand what we see (and further, to describe what we see) clearly and without distortion for we suspect that “truth”, by which we mean virtue, depends upon our doing so. At the same time, however, we cannot help but distort, to impose our will. We can never be fully objective for it is in our nature to embroider and enlarge upon what we see-we are driven to decorate, to improve on nature and to create new truths and new virtues.Murphy’s work tell another, interweaving story of her painter’s journey from realist to abstractionist to sly conceptualist, the author of beautiful paintings, brimming with ideas, but ruled by the heart.