"Why not stick a ham sandwich on it..."

Said Stephanie , a friend and fellow artist, when considering a piece i have hanging in a current show.

Good point, Steph, and accurate in regard to my always wanting to shock or offend, at least a little bit, in everything i make and say. One of my favorite artists of the moment is Rachel Harrison for just this reason.

No attempt to hit the comfort zone of the viewer. Those days of homage to the institutional taste of the viewer should be a thing of the distant past.Unfortunately the plutacracy has come to replace the church and government and many artists are afraid of the check-cutters power of eye.

Go ahead throw in that ham bone! have fun.

Sculpture meets painting.
Since Picasso, a postmodern bastard form that has great potential for the chronically restless.

Richard Prince found a way to unload his American teenage passions.

When about 13 my friend Tony and i stole cars for a season. We would tell our parents we were playing basketball in the proddy church basement court.

We'd skulk around outside the neighborhood barrooms until we found a car ('55 chevies were good because of a poorly designed ignition that was a snap to hot wire), and we'd take turns driving, lurching through the narrow 3-decker lined autumn streets. After a half hour or so we'd put the car back where we stole it and the next day check the paper for police reports.

When i see Prince's work i recall the mid-twentieth century male rituals of cars and dark roads and the legacy of road deaths and lung cancer.

"Don't let it cut into your studio time."

Life is like that.

The studio is not life.

For awhile it felt like suicide to me, but i always returned.

In the early '90's i sold many paintings; it was a great relief to have enough money for once.

It seemed to clear out my mind as well as my studio.

i jumped into my car and headed out to California.

i drove and drove until i ran out of road.

i stood at the Pacific and paced the beach...

Then drove 3,500 miles back to my studio.

Rusty metal versus Wyeth's egg tempera.

i will always go for the quotitian over the illusory.

My idea of visual language is informed by a love of

mortality, and resists the magic-tricks of high technique.

"Christina's World" seems an illustration to me, his farm houses read as sentimental distilations of pigment, and profound investment opportunities for the weathy collector.

Why even bother to make art is the question an artist must answer.

Not how to make it.

Matisse's "Violinist at the Window"

When i told a friend of my upcoming lecture on this painting (at the Newart Center, in Newton MA on Wednesday Feb. 3 at 7 pm), he remarked that the painting is like "a chicken bone stuck in your throat".

What a great description of such a raw image. When painted (1918) it must have been far beyond the pale of art world gestalt.

How does that fit with what Samuel Beckett said, in an interview with the art critic, George Duthuit, of Matisse, "...The only thing disturbed by the revolutionary...Matisse is a certain order on the plane of the feasible".

i'm having my annual California art workshop again this year. It will be in Joshua Tree National Park instead of the usual Anza Borrego State Park, where it's been held for the last 4 years. If interested call me: 7742929664...website is www.jmurrayart.com .

Picasso's Dream

SILVER

The polished spoon-;

reflections slide

and spark

ABSINTHE

On the canvas,

a flattened woman twists

and shatters

LEOPARD

Deep in Monmartre

an African merchant licks

his ivory teeth

SUGAR

Wetting his brush, the artist parts

the sweet thighs of commerce-;

objects ring like good glass

-john murray

This artist has spent many years struggling with the muteness of the visual. Perhaps the problem began as a child in a lower-middle-class home, where money was tight and art not readily available. I was struck by the narrative power of calendar art and amusement often meant walking to the library and reading under a tree on a summer day.
As an art student, I found painting to be a somewhat tedious exercise in manipulating sticky material and adhering it with horsehair bristles to a bouncy fabric surface.
So i studied print making.