I have looked at Pamela Murphy’s paintings for three or four years now, and I still find it difficult to write about them.
She is showing her new work at Fine Line Designs Gallery in Ephraim, and after spending some time looking at her work, and photographing it so I could look at it some more, I have concluded that her paintings have weight.
Not the kind of weight that bogs you down, but the kind of weight that rewards time looking. I am no doubt influenced by some recent reading of Alain de Botton and John Armstrong, who wrote “Art as Therapy.” Alain de Botton is a pretty interesting thinker who roams across art, philosophy, literature, work and architecture in his writings. His latest approach to art is to ask what the viewer can get from a work, rather than presenting the work of art as a challenge to your knowledge of aesthetics or art history — which school, what era, who are the influences, what comes after, etc.
And what does this have to do with Pamela Murphy? See for yourself.
Physically her work, if not unique, is unlike anything I have seen in the way she works in layers, scrapes, adds, scrapes some more, sometimes includes material other than paint — printed text or gold leaf, for example.
Alain de Botton writes about how a person working in a busy city might have a quiet landscape painting to enjoy and draw comfort from. His concepts could be helpful in approaching Murphy’s work. An older man stands with his head slightly tilted and a young girl clinging to his neck,
She is showing her new work at Fine Line Designs Gallery in Ephraim, and after spending some time looking at her work, and photographing it so I could look at it some more, I have concluded that her paintings have weight.
Not the kind of weight that bogs you down, but the kind of weight that rewards time looking. I am no doubt influenced by some recent reading of Alain de Botton and John Armstrong, who wrote “Art as Therapy.” Alain de Botton is a pretty interesting thinker who roams across art, philosophy, literature, work and architecture in his writings. His latest approach to art is to ask what the viewer can get from a work, rather than presenting the work of art as a challenge to your knowledge of aesthetics or art history — which school, what era, who are the influences, what comes after, etc.
And what does this have to do with Pamela Murphy? See for yourself.
Physically her work, if not unique, is unlike anything I have seen in the way she works in layers, scrapes, adds, scrapes some more, sometimes includes material other than paint — printed text or gold leaf, for example.
Alain de Botton writes about how a person working in a busy city might have a quiet landscape painting to enjoy and draw comfort from. His concepts could be helpful in approaching Murphy’s work. An older man stands with his head slightly tilted and a young girl clinging to his neck,
two women probably mother and daughter in bathing suits, seen from behind with beach gear, look headed to head to a beach which is never shown,
a boy kneels before an expectant crow. The work never becomes sentimental; it is thought provoking — what is happening before or after this moment in time?
Murphy works from vintage photographs and uses them to create images that resonate ambiguously. She doesn’t spell out a direction for the viewer to go or tap into an obvious reaction — oh, pretty lighthouse, rusty tractor, old fishing boat in field — that is easy to digest in a few seconds because the images are so familiar. Her work invited lingering and speculation.
New this year are pictures of barns, a pretty common subject in Door County painting. Hers have a different quality, perhaps because her technique with paint and canvas conveys aging so well. In one the barn is completely isolated from anything but the canvas, sitting alone in the image; in the other, the barn has some faded grass that bumps up against the canvas and stops, making it look as if the building is a model sitting on a display.
She has also done painting of small houses with flowers towering over them. “It’s not a pipe,” Rene Magritte wrote across a painting of a pipe. (“Ceci n’est pas un pipe) reminding people that a painting is, first of all, a painting. Murphy makes that clear in her decided choices of isolation and connection.
Pamela Murphy With Emmett and Jan Johns at her opening at Fine Line.
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