George Murphy 

George Murphy’s earliest artistic influence undoubtedly came from his father.  Genetics aside, one of his earliest memories was of his father painting enormous Disney character’s on the walls of the room that young George shared with his sister.  Though never a full-time or professional artist, Murphy’s father, Stewart, painted fairly frequently in oils.  As a radio-operator in the Royal Merchant Navy, toward the end of World War Two, Stewart had painted a small, matter-of-fact representation of the underground radar station which was his workplace in Plymouth, on the English coast.  This painting, along with other, more bucolic scenes of the Devonshire countryside, were dotted around Murphy’s childhood home.  At about the age of seven or eight, Murphy sat for a portrait his father made of him in india ink.  At around that time, Murphy’s father gave him a one-time lesson in oil painting.  The resulting panel, depicting a family of Plains Indians outside their teepee with mountains and clouds in the distance, was painted with his father’s guidance and from “life” though using plastic scale models.  The campfire the Native Americans gathered around was a cowboy campfire with a coffee pot brewing.  In 1964, in a regrettable act of aesthetic self-cleansing, a kind of one-man cultural revolution, Murphy burned this little painting along with numerous early works on paper, setting them on fire in the back yard of his London flat.  Fortunately a portrait photograph of the young Murphy posing with his “Indians” painting has survived.

 

Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts…

 

Among the other works that Murphy burned on that bleak afternoon on the north side of Clapham Common, was his entire output from high school.  Murphy had first attended what he termed a “rather rough” high school in Northeast London, a place, for example, where a painstakingly-crafted clay copy of a jackal-headed Egyptian god was mutilated by jealous classmates before it had time to dry.  However, halfway through Murphy’s schooling, his parents moved to a semi-rural area in Berkshire, about thirty miles outside of London, and it was there, in his new, and more genteel, high school, that Murphy fell into the very capable hands of a Mr Harry Moore.  Harry Moore was an art teacher more eccentric than most.  He rode to school each day on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, a machine very rarely seen on English roads at the time.  He was married to Dr Barbara Moore, who at the age of(?check #) had walked from the southernmost tip of the British Isles to it’s northernmost extremity in the space of (?check #))days.  But Harry Moore was not just a "character" with an art school training.  Harry had been to Hollywood as a scene painter for epic movies and he as a master of bold, dramatic, realism.  Moore, as Murphy puts it, taught him “to see and to understand exactly what he was seeing.”  Working from life in one-on-one, “free-study” periods, Moore passionately instructed Murphy in the simple “art of observing” - of grasping essential structure and in demonstrating the mechanics of light striking and rebounding from that structure… breaking down the subtle life within a shadow.  Delighted to find at least one able and attentive student, Harry Moore devoted as much time as he could to imparting his skills to a teenage Murphy.  It was a lesson that Murphy never forgot.

 

Dropping out of high school well before graduation, Murphy went back to London, to work for two years in a commercial photography studio just off the King’s Road in Chelsea.  It was the “Swinging Sixties” and, as a photographic assistant, Murphy found himself rubbing shoulders with the likes of Jean Shrimpton, Twiggy, and Mary Quant.  Just two weeks before Murphy’s arrival at the studio, George Harrison had visited there for a series of portrait photographs.  It was a few years later, and in quite different circumstances, that Murphy was to meet that particular Beatle in person.  Though Murphy never really aspired to be a photographer, he did take pictures with a borrowed Pentax at weekends and, in those grainy, 35 mm, black-and-whites, his keen sense of composition and order is plain to be seen.

 

After two years of inhabiting this hedonistic and notoriously superficial world of sex, drugs and Rock and Roll, albeit well on the sidelines, Murphy was ready to return to academia.  Under the influence of the relentlessly sinuous, elegant drawings of the Art Nouveau illustrator, Aubrey Beardsley, Murphy had been making similarly stylized ink and graphite drawings of friends and in depicting scenes from Classical mythology.  Feeling the need to take his education further, he applied to the Slade Art School.  Naively believing this relatively conservative institution would want to see relatively conservative work, Murphy submitted an especially prepared portfolio that probably doomed him to rejection.  Though continuing to draw from life and imagination, Murphy now turned to the idea of entering university.  In this, he succeeded but only by the skin of his teeth, and, after a year in which he garnered the qualifications which he had failed to get in high school, in 1970 he entered the University of York to major in Philosophy.

 

Just one year prior, Murphy had quite randomly attended the retrospective exhibit of paintings by René Magritte at the Tate Gallery in London.  This rather casual introduction to the Belgian’s surrealist's work proved a turning point, and Murphy walked out of the show determined to “paint like that.”  Indeed, using a set of oils he purchased in Chelsea, and employing whatever plywood came to hand, Murphy set to work to emulate the master.  Murphy’s earliest “serious” paintings were mostly given to friends and family members, though a handful of drawings, along with one or two paintings from that period, are still in the artist’s possession.

 

Having been financially independent of his parents for three years, Murphy, in 1970, was eligible for a full grant from the British government to attend York University, and so, with bed and board paid for three years, he did as little as was necessary to survive a dreary curriculum.  In his considerable spare time, and with the assistance of the campus art store, Murphy stretched and primed canvases, upon which he began to paint in earnest.  It was at this point that he also started to sell the work he was making, and to receive commissions.

 

Graduating with some sort of degree in 1974, Murphy continued living in the York area for another two or three years, steadily developing his visual “language” and enjoying the generous mentorship of a leading local artist, John Langton.  In 19??, during the York Arts Festival(?), Murphy put together his first exhibition - a solo show of paintings, collages, and small sculptural works in the York Arts Centre(?).  The title of the show was GOOD, THE PAINTING'S SAFE AND SOUND.

 

It was at this time, that Murphy made the acquaintance of the sculptor, David Nash.  Nash had mounted an exhibition of his own, as a part of the Arts Festival(?), and Murphy was introduced to Nash by Langton.  At the end of the festival, Murphy assisted the bright young sculptor in dismantling his exhibit and driving it in a converted ambulance to the latter’s studio in North Wales.

 

Upon his return to York, Murphy, inspired by Nash’s hand-hewn wood sculptures, began to make a series of constructed and carved pieces that reflected his own concern with the mundane. 

 

By now living in a remote farmhouse, a good twenty-minute walk from the nearby village of Stillingfleet, Murphy continued to paint and draw, soon dropping the surrealist element he’d taken from Magritte.  He proceeded, instead, to develop a language of his own that was at once dense and relentless, frequently creating images that challenged the viewer with an immediate but impenetrable mystery.  A surreal element has never left the artist altogether but he has continued to present reality…  ETC