Idris Murphy

Born in Bankstown, Idris Murphy’s approach to artmarking has been informed by periods spent in the UK and Europe, as well as frequent journeys to the East Macdonnell Ranges, Mutawintji National Park, and Fowlers Gap research station. His paintings are relational, rather than representational: they reflect an intimate, spritiual dialogue between the artist and the landscapes by which his life has been shaped.

In Australia there is an ongoing tradition of landscape painting that goes back for more than two centuries. There is also another tradition in Australian art that can be termed “painting country” that goes back millennia and is still thriving today. The Western European landscape tradition, that was imported to Australia, involves observing and recording a view in front of the artist, or a view as imagined by the artist. It can be a record of mood, a response to the sublime or the beauty of the scene, or an expression about the ownership of the land, the wealth that it harbours, or even a plea of concern for its threatened ecosystems. The landscape is something that is outside the artist that the artist captures through the chosen medium to express a particular sensibility. It may be highly representational or literal in its transcription, or abstracted and largely non-figurative. Where the painting country tradition fundamentally differs from the Western tradition of landscape art is that the artist sees themselves as part of the surrounding country – they don’t own the land, the land is part of them and in a sense owns them. As an “insider,” it is not only what is seen that is painted, but also what is “known” and perceived spiritually that is depicted. Although this latter tradition is primarily associated with Indigenous artists, one could argue that a number of non-Indigenous artists, for example Ian Fairweather, could be associated with this tradition.

In the fifty years that Idris Murphy has been exhibiting his art, from his first solo show at Macquarie Galleries in Sydney in 1972 through to his most recent exhibitions at King Street Gallery on William, also in Sydney, there has been a discernible shift from his early figurative and landscape paintings to his more recent work that may be described as painting country. Sydney-born, Murphy came of primarily Welsh and Irish stock and was named after his maternal grandfather, a World War I veteran, Idris Charles Pike, who died at about the time he was born. He trained at the National Art School where Kevin Connor, Colin Lanceley and John Coburn were some of his teachers. He subsequently spent about eighteen months in Melbourne married to the dancer Glennis Murphy (née Mills), and where he was awarded the Keith and Elisabeth Murdoch Travelling Scholarship that was judged by Fred Williams. This scholarship took him to London and Paris for about four years.

One of the conditions of the fellowship was that the successful applicant would be attached to a European art school. Murphy, who was already drawn to the work of David Hockney and Howard Hodgkin, applied to the Royal College of Art in London. Somehow his folio was lost and William Wright, formerly from Sydney and who at the time was the head of the Department of Painting at the Winchester School of Art, stepped in and enabled Murphy to enrol as a postgraduate student at Winchester. After a year at Winchester, Murphy and his wife spent the rest of the time living in London and Paris. A revelation of this first European sojourn was to see art in the flesh and to experience the colour-saturated magnificence of particularly Vincent van Gogh and Henri Matisse. Looking back at this period in his life, Murphy singles out the London-based painter Andrew Carnegie (who had been trained at the Royal Academy School under Roderic Barrett) as a friend and mentor who taught him to look at paintings.

While in Paris, Murphy made lithographs at the Editions Atelier Clot lithographic workshop, which had an illustrious heritage and that printed lithographs for artists that included Degas, Cézanne, Renoir, Sisley, Redon, Bonnard, Vuillard, Signac, Munch, Matisse, Rouault, Rodin and many others. Lithography was to remain an important part of Murphy’s oeuvre in subsequent decades.

On return to Australia and the birth of his first child, Murphy desperately needed a job and in 1980 started to teach at Wollongong. By 1984, he had moved to the Alexander Mackie College, renamed the City Art Institute in the UNSW College of Fine Arts (now UNSW Art and Design) where he was to remain for about fourteen years.

It was at about a year after Murphy started to work at Alexander Mackie College that he discovered the Australian outback. The college had a research station in Fowlers Gap, 112 kilometres north of Broken Hill, and he would take his students to draw and paint at the Mootwingee National Park (subsequently known as the Mutawintji National Park). It was here that he was struck by the revelation that while Matisse had to travel to Morocco to find the luminosity of colour, in Australia we had it in our own backyard in the outback.

It was at about this stage that Murphy started to grapple with the challenge of painting country. Forms assert themselves in his art so that it is possible to discern a tree, a shrub, or a slope of a hillside, but they are in no sense literal and in terms of colour are loaded with an inner luminosity. The artist also increasingly became interested in Indigenous people and the way in which they would see their land, their philosophies and their open belief systems. He was later to exclaim, “I feel at home with all that Indigenous material – at least the best of it.” An Indigenous artist whom he is prepared to identify as an influence on his practice is Ginger Riley Munduwalawala, known for his bright palette and for his depiction of simplified mythological creatures who formed his Country of the Gulf of Carpentaria.

Murphy paints almost exclusively in acrylics and was attracted to the medium for its broad range of colours and by its quick drying time, which is an important consideration for a person painting en plein air. On travelling to the outback, he was struck by the silver and gold colours that surrounded him on all sides. Murphy, in what was an unusual move at the time, started to use silver acrylic paint instead of white, which he would mix into his paintings of country. Subsequently, he also employed gold acrylic paint to give his paintings a rich, warm glow and inner luminosity.

Colour is the most important feature of Murphy’s art – it is the catalyst that draws him to a particular subject in the first place and it is his primary concern as he works on the painting. In more recent years, he has been making annual trips to Alice Springs where he has especially explored the East MacDonnell Ranges. Although many of these paintings may be described as being saturated with colour, they also possess a strong sense of presence, both physically, but more importantly, spiritually. It is this sense of spiritual presence that is a striking hallmark of his art practice.

Murphy’s father was a forestry worker who could give his family access to forests that were usually out of bounds for most people. The forest was to be a place of spiritual refuge for Murphy. He was born in Bankstown in a household that had little connection to art, and on entering the National Art School instinctively felt that this was a place where he belonged. This combination of the spiritual in nature and in art was to remain central to Murphy’s being throughout his practice as an artist. The philosopher Martin Buber, whose ideas have played a considerable role in shaping Murphy’s thinking, advanced a theory of dialogue, where something was not viewed in the abstract, but as part of a dialogue, a relationship that would involve a person with the object, the world, other people, and with God.
When looking at Murphy’s paintings of country it is possible to see within them a special relationship established between the artist and country that is being expressed through colour and form. Despite their high chromatic value with bright, glowing colours, they are quiet, meditative paintings that tend to absorb you. They encourage you to enter into them, quite literally to take a walk inside them, and through this journey establish your own reality and your own dialogue with the forms depicted. The brushstrokes may be described as gestural and expressive, but this is in a quiet Kandinsky-like manner or like in a Pierre Bonnard painting, in contrast to the screaming emotionalism of artists who tend to paint with their loins.

Many of Murphy’s paintings are difficult to verbalise and tend to reproduce poorly. They frequently depend for their success on a very subtle resolution of surface masses – the spread of a purple background, dabs of green denoting foliage, and strong stubborn verticals of tree-like forms or rock faces. They encourage a form of meditation through the image, where you develop your own relationship with the depicted reality. Murphy does not describe the reality that he depicts, but articulates a relationship with this reality that suggests that he has entered into a special spiritual dialogue with it.
As Martin Buber once evocatively stated, “This is the eternal origin of art that a human being confronts a form that wants to become a work through him. Not a figment of his soul but something that appears to the soul and demands the soul’s creative power. What is required is a deed that a man does with his whole being.”

This article was originally published in Artist Profile, issue 60

EXHIBITION
Reading The Other 
4 – 29 June, 2024
Mitchell Fine Art, Brisbane