Idris Murphy has been exhibiting his paintings professionally for more than half a century. Since his first solo show at the Macquarie Galleries in Sydney in 1972, through to his most recent exhibitions at the King Street Gallery on William, there has been a discernible shift from his early figurative and landscape paintings to his more recent work where the landscape element has remained constant, but the literal and mimetic elements have largely faded from view.
There is something increasingly ‘primal’ in his art – something that speaks of essence and something that is deeply rooted in our psyche. It is an art that reflects the beginning of a direct response to country or habitat and one that seems to bypass conscious thought and verbal explanations. He increasingly seems to adopt an instinctive response to country, but one that has been distilled through many decades of art practice.
Murphy refers to George Steiner’s Real Presences (1989), a book that famously attacked the deconstruction movement that was popular in literature and the arts and that, according to Steiner, created “the house of mirrors which is that of modernist theory and practice”. Steiner stressed the need to explore the power and presence of the unseen in art, in other words, seek out meaning and the spiritual in art.
Murphy’s new body of paintings possess a majesty and grandeur but are completely devoid of trickery and technical wizardry. They assert a spiritual and physical presence and, while conscious of topography and you may be able to discern a tree, shrub or rock form, they are not anchored in a specificity. The peculiarities in Murphy’s working method, like the use of metallic pigments to provide a luminosity to the surfaces, evokes a deeply sonorous, even musical quality in these paintings.
If Suzi Gablik spoke of the ‘re-enchantment’ of art (1991), Murphy’s primal landscapes reintroduce the sense of awe, enchantment and mystery to the country that he describes in his paintings. Many of the paintings possess a warm glow and, despite their structural simplicity, have a chromatic richness. As a student in Europe, he was drawn to the work of David Hockney and Howard Hodgkin and the quality of directness, naïve simplicity and love of textured blocks of colour have never left him. In Australia, he was attracted to the work of First Nations artists and particularly the art practice of Ginger Riley Munduwalawala, who was known for his bright palette and for his depiction of simplified mythological creatures who formed his country of the Gulf of Carpentaria.
While it is impossible to confuse Murphy’s art with that of Aboriginal painting – his art is highly distinctive and you can pick one of his paintings at fifty metres – his paintings, especially the most recent work, possess a strong spiritual presence and an enchanted state of being. Despite their high chromatic value with 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. 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.
Emeritus Professor Sasha Grishin AM, FAHA
Australian National University
Most artists I know don’t take too kindly to writing their ‘artist statement’.
Firstly because they have spent a great deal of time making a group of works, which are supposed to (as the cliche goes) speak for themselves. Add to that, the word ‘statement’ becomes somewhat problematic.
What fits, expression of views, affirmation, assertion, announcement, utterance?
How do artists discuss what they have produced, poets, the writers, the philosopher, those whose works are words, make more coherent statements, particularly when their views are about paintings and the landscape, which this statement proposes to be concerned with.
Simon Sharma suggests the first landscapes were the mounds where we first buried our dead.
Indigenous people in Australia have given a whole other meaning to the word ‘Country.’ so, seeing and looking, responding to County is also a ‘take-in’: and words need to be rethought.
Christopher Neve in the introduction of his book the ’Unquiet Landscape’, gives an insight (this word itself an introduction) when artists fumble to talk about what they see and what they have made.
“Painting is a risky process precisely because of the trials and errors and intuitive revisions that this kind of inarticulate thought involves.
“But the truth strikes you, when you see it, as unmistakable because it represents not just a way of seeing the landscape but a state of mind.
“It is in such half-formed ideas that painters will sometimes discuss, because they’re thoughts are at an angle to the pictures themselves and do not impinge too much upon them.”
Picasso said that some artists seek, I find; and although he was being a bit of a smart arse, he was no doubt onto something when making a painting. the problem of seeing and finding.
Never as simple as a statement, however Annie Dillard may help when she writes about seeing.
“The secret of seeing is, then, the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all, but while the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The literature of illumination reveals this above all: Although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise.”
Idris Murphy, 2025
