After thinking steadily about Murphy’s paintings for a month, last night I had a dream about her and her husband Harry Roseman. We went swimming in the ocean and bobbed up and down on the waves. Then we sat on a couch with Roseman between us. It was awkward. I couldn’t think what to say about the paintings and she regarded me with steady dislike.
Later, walking outside, Roseman told me that Murphy was very moved by poetry and I looked at her face and saw that it was true.
I do not know them personally.
Why is it so hard to think of what to say? Many of her paintings don’t touch me at all and a few of them blow me away, and I’ve been trying to figure out why.
Like Harry’s Office, which is in the blow-away category. It is almost but not quite classical American trompe l’oeil (I think of John Peto). Nothing actually looks like it could be plucked off the surface, not even the dangling wire but otherwise it uses every trick in the book: the folded papers catching the light, the reflections on the plastic sleeves, the sharp shadows and highlights. The difference may be that everything is tucked in or extends beyond the canvas—and then again the whole structure might collapse if a part was removed. It is a deep pleasure to study every detail of it—as she did.
I don’t feel the same way about Double Bed. I get it immediately, married couple, one asleep, the other insomniac. But I don’t want to get it immediately.
Photography has also influenced how painters see. Still Living is very “digital”–everything is in focus, even the surrounding forest. This effect is created by the intensity with which Murphy has painted each tiny section and the miraculous way they have been fitted together. It reminded me of Andreas Gursky’s composite photographs which I like, but this is better.
A storm has ripped a major limb from the trunk leaving a deep gash. Each thin strip of bark and the vertical inner rings are a stroke of paint and the dark lines that are created between them is from the underpainting. (I hope I got that right.) Together they picture the tree but in sections they have a beautiful abstract quality. It is wonderful to get lost in the detail and swirl back into the whole. It is a dazzling tour-de-force and quite different in nature from her other paintings.
One thing that distinguishes Murphy is her restless search for subject matter. That makes it difficult to discover their purpose beyond the literal description of objects. But then it also seems to me that her best paintings are the literal descriptions of objects. The least successful seem contrived, make a too easily grasped point and contain human beings.
Aside has all that.
Or maybe I just don’t like insipid looking women flattened onto a guy’s crotch area. Oddly enough this is also an effect when a shot is taken from a distance with a zoom lens: the image flattens out. Did I mention though that Murphy does not paint from photographs?I cannot experience Aside slowly like I can Harry’s Office and Still Alive. The sweaters and the hair of the women are quite dutiful and boring to look at.
When I first saw Murphy’s work many years ago I didn’t get the point except for one drawing—chocolate chip cookies on a pan in the oven. I was awed. I like this very much too.
To go back to that restless search for a subject—Murphy addressed this in an interview with Francine Prose:
“Reality is not just there for my own greedy use. If I were to take the blue blanket and paint it over and over, it would be at the mercy of my formalist agenda. But that blue blanket has its own agenda, and I want to respect that agenda. Using it over and over again would lessen its impact as a subject, not just in the eye of the viewer, but in my own eye. I would be . . . using it. And I don’t want to do that.”
Let’s see—was Monet a greedy user of unrespected haystacks, Cezanne of innocent apples, Morandi of his horde of bottles with their own agendas? Or did they reveal another aspect of reality—studying light, exploring space and probing intimate relationships?
But every painter has an internal set of rules that don’t make sense except when they wonderfully do.
—CNQ