Deirdre Murphy

Region: Northeast


City / State: Ardmore, PA

A box of seemingly random puzzle pieces somehow magically fit together to make a clear image. The clicking sound of the puzzle pieces fitting together is analogous to the satisfaction I receive when I work on a painting. As an artist, I, too, find disparate images and shapes in nature, and through collage, knit them together to tell a story and to narrate a theme.

In this body of work, I use a lexicon of personal icons: house, boat, bird, monkey and moth. Each of these icons evokes a feeling of the familiar, yet it also evokes something strange. My art deals with perception and that moment in time when something ordinary becomes extraordinary. Each painting starts with a visual experience of something that has caught my attention: a massive ship lodged upon a parking lot, a cargo train cutting across an urban garden plot, prisms reflected upon a gray wall, the subtle shifts of color in a moth's wings.

One of my goals is to create an experience of the saturation of the senses for the viewer. Each painting poses a series of visual problems to be solved. Palette choice informs space as well as light and temperature in the paintings. Color is also selected for a specific sensory intention and sets the rhythm or tempo of the painting. The application of paint, whether thick or thin, glazed or impasto, gives the paintings a tactile surface, thus engaging the sense of touch.

The imagery in these paintings acts as a portal, transporting the viewer to new sensory places. For a moment, our beliefs are suspended, and we are allowed to slip into the realm of the painted world, where anything is possible. Success is realized when the viewer walks away from my paintings and sees the richness of color and texture all around them.