PAT MURPHY: PAINTINGS AND DRAWINGS
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Artemisia is an artist-run cooperative gallery divided into several exhibition spaces, each featuring a different show. Murphy’s five oil paintings and 15 watercolors hang in a room to the right of the main exhibition area. In contrast to the polished presentations of the wood-framed works under glass in some of the other rooms, Murphy’s pieces are displayed sans packaging. The absence of such familiar, authoritative devices as frames, pedestals, and Plexiglas seems appropriate to the work’s raw energy. Hung in simple linear fashion around the room, the medium- to large-size oils take up two walls and part of a third; the smaller watercolors, sometimes arranged one above the other, occupy the remaining space. Labels and title sheets have been dispensed with, since each piece has a title painted into some area of the composition.
Certainly the most forceful–even assaultive–of the paintings is The Tiger Is at the Door. Featuring the profiled head and gaping, slavering jaws of an enraged tiger on the right side and several roughly painted lines suggestive of a window and doorway on the left, this picture is a direct attack on the sorry state of society. Recalling the exaggerated, confrontational style of political cartoons and graffiti art, the tiger has been outlined vigorously in eccentric black strokes and filled in with fiery hues of red, yellow, and orange. Numerous phrases have been written in arbitrary areas of the tiger’s head, phrases like “Earth-Soul Pollution,” “Corrupt Religious Leaders,” and “Everything Must Be Given Up.” Single words and short phrases naming important issues of the day also appear: “AIDS,” “Rape,” “Nuclear War,” and “Homeless,” for example. From the middle of the painting’s left edge, a long yellow stripe bearing the slogan “Faith Is Your Airplane” runs across the left half of the composition and smacks into the red flame of the tiger’s wide-open mouth. The background is green with several black crosshatch marks along the upper edge and black directional lines erupting from the purple window shape near the upper left corner.
Murphy’s work is not only visually stimulating but sincere and unfettered. The themes, however varied, converge and blend because they have been deeply considered and felt. It may be that cool, slick theoretical work has held the spotlight for some time now, but Murphy makes no apologies for her hot, brash, confrontational style. It isn’t intellectually trendy and it may not get her name in Gardiner’s newest edition of Art Through the Ages, but it is the informed work of a true artist and a free spirit.
