Catherine Murphy at Peter Freeman Inc, April 2013 (from Gorky's Granddaughter)

Catherine Murphy at Peter Freeman Inc, April 2013 from Gorky's Granddaughter on Vimeo.

 
Fascinating video by Zachary Keeting who interviews Catherine Murphy for the Gorky’s Granddaughter blog. Catherine Murphy talks about her recent work currently showing at the Peter Freeman Gallery (3/14 – 4/27/13) Great video footage of her paintings which show the paintings close up and asks many thoughtful questions.
 
Excerpt from the Peter Freeman, Inc press release for the show:

Murphy’s newest paintings and drawings show a profound interest in depicting common surroundings that usually escape our notice but nevertheless influence our perception: a pile of dust, a hole in the ground, or the stains found on a wall shift views usually unseen to become images that demand our full attention. Murphy does not work from photographs but, instead, directly from objects staged in her studio to recreate mental images drawn from memory and dreams. Her practice requires intense dedication to each work, a prolonged process that can take months, sometimes even years. The choice between drawing or painting is, as the artist explains, determined by the subject itself, giving painting and drawing the same importance within the artist’s oeuvre.

A lively and engaging interview with Catherine Murphy from Bombsite.com

 

A couple of my favorite of the many unforgettable quotes from this 1995 interview:
 

Catherine Murphy: That’s also the way figurative painters have skirted around the issue of being figurative painters. They have said, “Really, I’m an abstract painter, and this is how I’m going to let you know it. I’m going to paint the same egg for the next thirty years, so finally after thirty years you’ll understand that the egg wasn’t really that important. It was the form that was important.” And that’s exactly what I don’t want to do. An apple on a table is an apple on a fucking table. That’s its reality. I know that’s not very fashionable philosophically to have the reading of something be the something that it is. And it is the something that it is—but it’s very much more as well.

………

CM There was, and there wasn’t. I was such a big loud girl that I did very well at Pratt. We were taught the language of Picasso, and I’m very grateful for that. Cezanne allowed me to break up the canvas geometrically. I made representational paintings that were very loose, that looked influenced by the California painters. It was very gradual. I finally decided to commit to depicting what I saw. Planes in their proper place in space. I wanted to say, “Let’s see that happens when I take away the veil.” I also loved work like Robert Smithson’s and Robert Mangold’s. But I thought they had nothing to do with my paintings. Until finally I thought: Why wasn’t I allowing these influences into my paintings? And this voice in my head said, “Because they are the other people. The people who don’t like us.” I call that representational painting paranoia. Thinking that nobody likes us, so we’re not going to like anybody back. (laughter) And that’s all bullshit. Any painter who has any brains has no prejudice against one kind of painting or another.

 
please read the entire interview on Bomsite.com from this link…