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Deirdre Murphy Birds are ephemeral and temporal by nature possessing the unique ability to occupy both air and earth; they have the freedom to go anywhere. The peregrinatious birds of Philadelphia are inspiring because they see the colorful landscapes and boundless skies that I long to see but can only imagine. It is this exuberant, elusory quality of life embodied by birds that I explore in my paintings. In each painting a specific bird and its environment are juxtaposed with invented spaces and abstract forms to challenge the notion of real and abstract, temporal and ethereal, evanescent and eternal. A hummingbird darts quickly, flitting from flower to flower through the dense flora that bursts through a pulsating thicket of abstract shapes into a tonally muted landscape. The rhythm in the palette is fast and slow, the application of paint is bold and intricate, and the pictorial space is both flat and deep. These paintings are filled with harmony and discord symbolic of delicious moments that are tangible, yet elude clear perception; elements found in nature and mirrored in life. The bird imagery came in tandem with my exploration of Japanese landscape painting inspired by a year abroad in Japan, and these memories still influence my work today. When I was very young, I lived in Paris, France and Manchester, England where memories of the villas in the mountainside, cloisters and cathedrals still inform my paintings. I combine both Eastern and Western sensibilities in my paintings to simultaneously compress and expand space. The Natural Academy of Science has been generous with their collection and has allowed me to privately draw and paint from their exhibits. I am intrigued by the musty dioramas with their artificial containment of nature. I have also made frequent trips to a taxidermy tavern in Western Pennsylvania where I photographed their collection of exquisitely posed taxidermy deer in glass cases. The Philadelphia Zoo has been a source of inspiration with their contrived natural habitats and diverse species. "Artifice", the title of my solo show at the Bridgette Mayer
Gallery is the realization of my research. My paintings have evolved from
these artificial dioramas, the zoo's habitat exhibits and other contrived
spaces. The chicanery lies in the contrast of nature housed in artificial
settings. I find this contrast of real and artificial to be amusing, awkward
and beautiful. On a deeper level, this contrast reveals an illusory longing,
both to assimilate with nature, but yet to recognize our separateness.
Deirdre Murphy A box of seemingly random puzzle pieces somehow magically fit together to make a clear image. The clicking sound of these puzzle pieces fitting together is analogous to the satisfaction I receive when I work on a painting. As an artist, I, too, find disparate images and shapes in nature, and through collage, knit them together to tell a story and to narrate a theme. In this body of work, I use a lexicon of personal icons: house, boat, bird, monkey and moth. Each of these icons evokes a feeling of the familiar, yet it also evokes something strange. My art deals with perception and that moment in time when something ordinary becomes extraordinary. Each painting starts with a visual experience of something that has caught my attention: a massive ship lodged upon a parking lot, a cargo train cutting across an urban garden plot, prisms reflected upon a gray wall, the subtle shifts of color in a moth's wings. One of my goals is to create an experience of the saturation of the senses for the viewer. Each painting poses a series of visual problems to be solved. Palette choice informs space as well as light and temperature in the paintings. Color is also selected for a specific sensory intention and sets the rhythm or tempo of the painting. The application of paint, whether thick or thin, glazed or impasto, gives the paintings a tactile surface, thus engaging the sense of touch. The imagery in these paintings acts as a portal, transporting the viewer
to new sensory places. For a moment, our beliefs are suspended, and we
are allowed to slip into the realm of the painted world, where anything
is possible.
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. Lilly Wei Lilly Wei is a New York-based independent curator, essayist and critic
who writes regularly for Art in America and is a contributing editor at
ARTnews and Art Asia Pacific.
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