James Murphy

What interests me is the virtue of an image. Why do I find one image exciting and a similar one dull? While the answer may relate to composition, color, rhythm, incompleteness, suggestion, and other variables, I believe the source of an abstract painting’s strength must be uncertain. It needs to go beyond verbal description and pattern for its own sake. Paradoxically, at that point successful ones become real in that they avoid the metaphorical and have an objective, independent existence.

I am academically trained and started out doing four years of life drawing in the studio.  After two terms of human anatomy, this evolved into figurative oil painting.  Finally, out of pure curiosity, I began doing abstract acrylic paintings.