week of Dec 31, 2012

christmas morning

walked

out to

start treadmill

in barn

for Mary

light

snow quiet

trees old

building

hawk

flies from limb

silent

Again no class next week, but art is everywhere. 

This time of year is beautiful and difficult.

Notice the way painting develops by an oblique and surprising method.  

Happy New Year, see you the week of Jan 7th. john.

John Murray weekof Dec. 24, 2012

No class this week and next but I wanted to wish you a merry solstice, holiday, christmas.

I've also posted an interesting email I received from Susan Bazett, a painter who took my class for 7 years and is now attending the Museum School Boston:

Taken from a letter written by Philip Guston to Ross Feld

I am writing about the generous law that exists in art. A law which can never be given but only found anew each time in the making of the work. It is a law, too, which allows your forms (characters) to spin away, take off, as if they have their own lives to lead - unexpected, - too as if you cannot completely control it all. I wonder why we seek this generous law, as I call it. For we do not know how it governs - and under special conditions it comes into being. I don't think we are permitted to know, other then temporarily. A disappearance act. The only problem is how to keep away from the minds that close in and itch ( God knows only why) to define it.



Philip Guston speaking with Morton Feldman in an interview.

As long as you're telling stories, I have a story. Some time ago. I guess in the early fifties, I was very broke and I needed all the teaching I could get. and a psychiatrist, I mean a guy who worked in a clinic in New Jersey, wanted to study painting with me. The idea was, he would bring me his paintings once a week and I would criticize them. Fr twenty-five dollars, something like that. And I said sure. And he came and he must have brought about a hundred paintings on paper. He filled up my whole studio with his work. He tacked it all up and I criticized it. And he came back the next week ten paintings. And I started criticizing them and talking about painting. Well, to make a story short, he skipped a week, which meant I didn't get any money that week. Then he came with one painting. And finally he stopped coming. He called me about a month later and he said I'd made him stop painting altogether. He decided to give up painting. You know, he thought he was ....Christ, his hand moved, he made colors, forms. It's very dangerous to study painting, ( laughter), with me anyway. I can stop anybody painting.

Susan Bazett

I think the act of painting is very magical, very mysterious, a life's work. I don't think you ever learn it you just begin to chuck out all the things you thought it was and what is left is just you alone putting paint on a surface. Then perhaps something called painting will begin to take its place and you will be able to follow its directions.

The painting at top is a small piece I did last week in class.

See you the week of Jan 7, 2013,  Have fun, john.

John murray classes week of Dec. 17, 2012

Monday the 17th is the last day of class for Oil and Acrylic Workshop and John Murray Medley.

However; there is a makeup day on wed. the 19th for these same two classes due to a storm cancellation for super-storm Sandy.

If you can get to NY during holiday, make sure you don't miss "Matisse: In Search of True Painting"
at the Metropolitan. I am going to go sometime before it closes on March 17, 2013.
He is my greatest painting hero of the last century.
In fact I'd have to go back to the cave painters to find painterly production that stands in beauty, existential awe of existence and plastic ingenuity of his caliber.
If you get there please buy a catalog for your own knowledge and study.
If you have any work you did this term that you want me to look at and comment on please bring it to class.
Thank you for taking my class and I hope you sign up again for the Winter term.
See you next week.
john. 

John Murray classes week of Dec.10, 2012

Last full week of classes for the term.

How about a final exam?

How do you feel about these questions?

See you next week, john.

ART AS PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY

(questions for an artist)

1. Rather than making art why not turn to the study of philosophy or theology for ones inquiry into the meaning of life?

2. What would Freud, Nietzsche and others say about the commodity paradox that traditional painting and sculpture present?

3. When an object works as leverage for the mind does the making of such a thing necessarily grant the maker the title “artist”?

4. Is the process of making the art object any longer a valid pursuit now that it’s separate

from information dispersal, and traditional political and theological goals; or is it more valid than ever in view of this.

5. Did Marcel Duchamp destroy art by introducing conceptual reference over retinal authority?

6. Would Duchamp’s “Fountain” been more interesting as an object, if instead of appropriating a ready-made urinal, he had made a plaster version and hand-painted it with glossy white oil paint?

7. Would you prefer to show your work in a slick, white-box gallery in a cultural metropolis, or would you consider the idea of exhibiting it as a billboard on a desolate Nebraska highway as superior?

8. What quality would the Nebraska location add to the work?

9. Do you believe in the “presence” in the art object?

10. If you answered yes to question 9, how do you feel about reproductions of art objects? Can a reproduction retain any of the original’s qualities?

11. Has serious contemporary art become a collectible for the very rich and an irrelevancy for the middle class?

12. Has painting lost its importance in the western world’s intellectual dialogue?

13. If you are a painter, what role would you like to have your work seen in?

14. Does your painting sometimes feel stuck between a concept and a frozen object?

15. Is “new” art primarily fashion driven?

16. Is art today too vulnerable to both nostalgia and and stylistic pressure?

17. If one considers art essentially reductive, is the arena for expression rapidly disappearing?

18. Is attaining a transcendental paint surface enough to make a painting successful?

19. Does the idea of figure/ground intrigue you, irritate you or bore you?

20. If you had the resources would you hire a studio assistant?

21. Which do you feel best expresses what moves artistic vision: tapping the collective unconscious or the individual eccentric vision?

22. Which more inspires your work, the exotic or the banal?

23. Nature or the works humans?

24. Is there life behind the picture plane or is painting primarily an accumulation of pigment and binder on a surface?

25. How would you rate the importance of your materials to your work?

26. Is the familiar viable in art?

27. Can art be a process of defamiliarization?

28. What does power have to do with art?

29. How much does exuberance have to do with it?

30. Can an artist ignore the work of others? 

John murray classes week of Dec. 3, 2012

We have a model next week all classes.
Female nude.

See you next week john.

John Murray classes week of Nov. 26, 2012

(nothing whichful about

thick big this

friendly

himself of

a boulder)nothing

mean in tenderly

whoms

of sizeless a

silence by noises

called people called

sunlight

(elsewhere flat the mechanical

itmaking

sickness of mind sprawls)

here

a living free mysterious

dreamsoul floatstands

oak by birch by maple

pine

by hemlock spruce by

tamarack(

nothing pampered puny

impatient

and nothing

ignoble

)everywhere wonder

if (touched by love’s own secret)we, like homing

through welcoming sweet miracles of air

(and joyfully all truths of wing resuming)

selves,into infinite tomorrow steer

-souls under whom flow(mountain valley forest)

a million wheres which never may become

one(wholly strange;familiar wholly)dearest

more than reality of more than dream-

how should contented fools of fact envision

the mystery of freedom?yet,among

their loud exactitudes of imprecision,

you’ll(silently alighting)and I’ll sing

while at us very deafly a most stares

colossal hoax of clocks and calendars

  

I love this poem by ee cummings and wondered if you could use it as grist for your visual mill.
See you next week, john.

John Murray classes week of Nov. 19, 2012

Sometimes I wonder whether I am painting pictures of words or whether I’m painting pictures with words.
—Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha’s oeuvre has never been confined to established categories of style or media; for instance, books, drawings, prints, photography, and painting are used in parallel, together with materials as unconventional as gunpowder, fruit juice, bleach, coffee, and syrup. But throughout Ruscha's restrained yet daring experimentation, writing as act and subject, in print form or painted on canvas, has remained a constant inspiration for his iconic images of the American vernacular. His singular, sometimes oblique use of words allows for the exploration of the role of signifiers in language and thought, while his range of artistic means allows the act of reading to be literally manipulated as a process by which to generate meaning.

This exhibition follows “Reading Ed Ruscha” at Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria, which fully explored Ruscha's obsession with books and language from the outset of his career. In New York the focus is exclusively on his consideration of the book over the last twenty-five years as a subject, as a support for pictures, or as an actual object. It includes acrylic and oil paintings, drawings on paper, watercolors on vellum, photographs, and book works.

In the small painting History (2005), Ruscha deflates a huge topic with an austere yet highly illusionistic side view of a rather-too-slim book spine on which the word appears. Whereas in the large-format painting Gilded, Marbled and Foibled (2011–12), he lets loose in a richly patterned description of traditional decorative bookmaking techniques, while the title provides a riposte to early Conceptual Art instruction. The Open Book series (2002–05), finely executed on untreated linen as a direct allusion to traditional bookbinding materials, appears as life-size images inviting closer perusal, while the giant works of the Old Book series present age-worn pages as monumental artifacts.

Various bookworks provide corollaries to the paintings. A strategy for a series of insidious small abstract paintings from 1994–95, where words forming threats are rendered as blank widths of contrasting color like Morse communication, resurfaces a decade later in book covers, where the oppositional actions of enunciation and erasure meet. In another book series, Ruscha has again used bleach to leach a single large initial on the colored linen covers of found books, such as a gothic M on the cover of Imaginary Gardens, or L L on two matching Shakespeare tomes entitled Twins (diptych), by which he deftly transforms one medium and format into another. In another, monochrome books mimic Minimalist objects and sport appropriately generic titles such as Atlas or Bible.

Ed Ruscha was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1937 and studied painting, photography, and graphic design at the Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts). His work is collected by major museums worldwide. Major museum exhibitions include the drawing retrospective “Cotton Puffs, Q-Tips®, Smoke and Mirrors,” which toured U.S. museums in 2004–05; “Ed Ruscha: Photographer,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Musée National Jeu de Paume, Paris (2006); and, “Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting,” Hayward Gallery, London (2009, traveling to Haus der Kunst, Munich and Moderna Museet, Stockholm in 2010). “Ed Ruscha: Road Tested,” Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas (2011); “On the Road,” The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2011). “Reading Ed Ruscha” concluded at the Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria in mid-October, just as “The Ancients Stole All Our Great Ideas” opened at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, an exhibition that Ruscha was invited to curate, working from the national art and natural history collections. It remains on view until December 2, 2012.

Nice work, by a great artist.Do some research online see if you agree.

See you next week (mon.). john.

No class on wed. day before thanksgiving!

John Murray classes week of Nov.12, 2012

No class mon. the 12th (Veterans Day).

To commemorate the holiday here is a poem by e.e. cummings;

why must itself up every of a park

anus stick some quote statue unquote to

prove that a hero equals any jerk

who was afraid to answer "no"?

quote citizen unquote might otherwise

forget(to err is human;to forgive

divine)that if the quote state unquote says

"kill" killing is an act of christian love.

"Nothing" in 1944 A D

"can stand against the argument of mil

itary necessity" (generalissimo e)

and echo answers "there is no appeal

from reason" (freud)-you pays your money and

you doesn't take your choice. Ain't freedom grand

-e.e. cummings circa 1950 from Xaipe

Above is a painting I did 5 years ago "Silverline" that to me is a reference to my own military service.

Does this poem bring to mind a work of visual art for you?

See you wed. john.

John Murray classes week of Nov. 5, 2012

Monday classes have a model next week. A female nude series of poses.
I have thus far been unable to get a model for Wed. (Supercharged a.m. and p.m.), so if anyone is desparate to work from the model swap class from wed. to mon. (preferably the afternoon class which is small on mon.). I will keep trying to get a model for wed.; however.
Please bring charcoal and fixatif and a new prepared canvas on mon.

John Murray classes week of Oct. 29, 2012

Work with a common household object and do an interpretive painting or deconstruct it and put it back in painterly terms. I've shown a piece I did in this manner this Summer. Matisse and Picasso did much of this in their work.
See you next week, john. (happy Halloween on Wed.!)

John Murray classes week of Oct. 22, 2012

Art Review

Planter of the Seeds Of Mind-Expanding Conceptualism

By KEN JOHNSON

• Anyone who wants art to be more radical, anti-market and otherwise against the establishment should hasten to the Brooklyn Museum to see “Materializing ‘Six Years’: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art.” Traditionalists who bemoan the triumph of mind over matter brought to us by Bruce Nauman, Sol LeWitt, Adrian Piper and scores of others in the mid-to-late 1960s will also profit, for they will here become better acquainted with their enemy. Today’s booming market for attractive objects notwithstanding, most of the ideas, values and fantasies that animated the conceptual turn half a century ago are still in play in the more intellectually fashionable circles of the art world.

Enlarge This Image

A notebook page by Lee Lozano for “No Title (Grass Piece)” (1969), a performance work for which she tried to stay stoned on marijuana for 30 days.

An image of Vito Acconci in his “Following Piece” (1969).

The show is not a conventional museum period survey. Rather, it approximates how the rise of Conceptualism was seen, while it was happening, by one person: the curator, critic and writer Lucy R. Lippard. Ms. Lippard (born in 1937) is known today mainly as a feminist and leftist activist, but in the years addressed by the exhibition — 1966 to 1973 — she was an extraordinarily energetic participant in, and promoter of, what was then seemingly a relatively apolitical trend.

Organized by Catherine Morris, curator of the museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, and Vincent Bonin, an independent curator and writer, the exhibition is designed to reflect the chronological structure of the seminal book Ms. Lippard published in 1973 to document her involvement with the Conceptualist movement. Its lengthy, unlovely title is worth citing in full, as it reflects the dauntingly cerebral tenor of much of the art it describes: “Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972: a cross-reference book of information on some esthetic boundaries; consisting of a bibliography into which are inserted a fragmented text, art works, documents, interviews, and symposia, arranged chronologically and focused on so-called conceptual or information or idea art with mentions of such vaguely designated areas as minimal, anti-form, systems, earth, or process art, occurring now in the Americas, Europe, England, Australia, and Asia (with occasional political overtones), edited and annotated by Lucy R. Lippard.”

Yes, that is like a mouthful of sawdust, and a lot of what is in the show is similarly dry and technocratic. There are charts, maps, magazines, exhibition catalogs and pages of dense verbiage. Among dozens of aesthetically indifferent photographs are examples from Douglas Huebler’s impossible mission to take a picture of every person in the world, and images of Vito Acconci performing his “Following Piece,” in which he tailed strangers on the street until they went indoors. Notebooks by Lee Lozano are filled with carefully hand-printed texts describing, for example, a performance work called “No Title (Grass Piece),” for which she tried to stay continuously stoned on marijuana for 30 days.

Some things are weirdly disconcerting, like Mr. Nauman’s video of his hands kneading his own hairy thigh into different shapes. Some are comical. William Wegman’s video “Spit Sandwiches” offers a close-up view into the artist’s mouth as he sings a nonverbal, percussive tune. Bas Jan Ader’s “Fall I, Los Angeles” is a 34-second film showing him tumbling off the roof of a one-story house. Generally, though, there is not a lot of hilarity to be found. And excepting a Minimalist diptych by Jo Baer, conventional painting is entirely absent. It is not a visually ingratiating show.

Oddly, there is little acknowledgment of world events. An exception is the famous poster picturing victims of the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War, overlaid by the text reading “Q. And babies? A. And babies,” which was distributed by the Art Workers Coalition in 1970. But the overall impression is of a nearly autistic, self-reflexive insularity.

Conceptualism’s political import is better understood when considered against the background of the mainstream art world at the time. Abstract painting, championed by the powerfully influential critic Clement Greenberg, was ascendant, and the market for contemporary art was booming, thanks to Pop Art. Young radicals viewed the commercial gallery system as a cog in the capitalist machine that they believed responsible for the war in Vietnam. Refusing to produce goods for sale to comfortable collectors and instead making “dematerialized” works that sharpened and elasticized thought were construed as forms of political resistance.

This helps to explain what seems in retrospect to be the messianic nature of Ms. Lippard’s involvement. Between 1969 and 1973 she organized a series of four exhibitions in four cities. This she did by traveling to each place with many of the works in a suitcase in the form of artists’ instructions for realizing the pieces on site. Each show had for its title a number signifying the population of the host city. One in Seattle in 1969, for example, was called “557,087”; “2,972,453” took place in Buenos Aires in 1970. She was, you could say, the Johnny Appleseed of Conceptual Art, planting germs of mind-expanding thought that would grow and flourish around the world.

In the early ’70s Ms. Lippard’s commitments changed in response to a pertinent question asked by some: Why were there so few female artists among the cohort she was promoting? In 1973 in Valencia, Calif., she organized her last numbered show, “c. 7,500,” which included Conceptual works by 26 women, including Agnes Denes, Martha Rosler and Yoko Ono. In the decade after that she devoted herself to promoting female artists of all kinds. In some ways this was a reversal of field, from a mandarin preoccupation with pure thought to a populist concern for the economic and political conditions of living people in the real world.

But as Ms. Lippard notes in an essay in the Brooklyn exhibition’s excellent catalog, it was not a rejection of where she was coming from: “Conceptual Art in the broadest sense was a kind of laboratory for innovations in the rest of the century. An unconscious international energy emerged from the raw materials of friendship, art history, interdisciplinary readings and a fervor to change the world and the ways artists related to it.” That energy can still be felt in this richly illuminating show.

“Materializing ‘Six Years’: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art” is on view through Feb. 3 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park; (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org.

Roy Lichenstein at the National Gallery of Art Washington DC

WASHINGTON — Like a champion gymnast perfecting a winning routine, Roy Lichtenstein developed a deft, tight, virtually foolproof art style, one that was based on agility rather than brawn and, though narrow in range, was capable of surprising variations and extensions. 

‘Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective’

• 

Among the pieces in the exhibition is “M-Maybe,” from 1965.

The look of this art isn’t big, but it’s smart; cool and dry, but accessible. Connoisseurs and know-nothings alike can enjoy it, and for some of the same reasons. And there’s the recognition factor: very high. Once you’ve encountered his work, you’d know it anywhere. Catch a glimpse of a Lichtenstein out of the corner of your eye from a moving cab, and it will register, half-seen.

“Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective,” a traveling exhibition now at the National Gallery of Art here, is the first major survey of his work since his death, at 73, in 1997. It’s a big show and has a few slow spots, but on the whole it moves right along. Its 14 thematic sections have been edited with less-is-more dispatch. There aren’t many labels to detain you. Most important, Lichtenstein’s large-featured images, with their Ben-Day dot patterns; thick, black contours; and flat, bright colors are almost ergonomically comfortable to the eye.

Lichtenstein, born and raised in Manhattan, was focused on art from the start. Barely out of high school, he enrolled at the Art Students League and studied painting with Reginald Marsh. After a three-year Army stint during World War II, he earned an M.F.A. from Ohio State University, and worked here and there before moving to New Jersey in 1960, then back to New York City the following year.

Like almost everyone else, he had been turning out brushy paintings — there are a few in the show — in an Abstract Expressionist vein. But by 1960, that model felt style-cramping and uncool. There had to be other options, and he found one: he started painting cartoons.

The earliest example, “Look Mickey,” from 1961, is the first thing you see in the exhibition: a picture of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, adapted from a Disney children’s book.

Lichtenstein would later say that he painted it for his kids. In reality, he painted it for himself, to get as far away as possible from where he’d been.

He kept going in this new direction. He clipped ordinary images — a hot dog, a pair of Keds, a manicured female hand doing housework — from tabloid newspapers, comic strips and advertisements; made drawings of the images; transferred those drawings, enlarged, to canvases; and painted them. He set everything in the paintings against fields of Ben-Day dot patterns to suggest the look of cheap commercial printing, initially creating the patterns with a dog’s grooming brush dipped in paint.

What he was making, of course, was Pop Art. He didn’t invent it, but he was quickly pegged as one of its defining exponents, and his career took off. In 1961, through a fellow artist, he met the dealer Leo Castelli, who agreed to represent him, and immediately added him to a group show of other stars on the rise, including Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella. Andy Warhol would soon join the team.

Lichtenstein’s first Castelli solo, in 1962, sold out before it opened. He was clearly at the beginning of a heady ride, though he experienced it largely from the perspective of his studio, where he spent most of his time, refining and toning the formal aspects of his art and judiciously expanding its repertory of themes. He became comfortable working in thematic series, keeping several in progress at once.

In the early 1960s he continued to paint everyday objects, but switched from color to black and white. He also moved from Disney comics to a romantic genre produced by DC Comics, from which he adapted a line of close-up images of the faces of lovelorn, emoting young women. The 1963 “Drowning Girl” become one of his best-known pictures.

By this time, too, he was attracting disapproval. His work was criticized for being lightweight, nostalgic, uncritical, conservative: pseudo-populist art for the carriage trade. With the Vietnam War moving into high gear, and resistance at home on the boil, the perceived ideological defects of his art seemed particularly glaring. 

Or like Roy Lichtenstein you can be a commercial painter designer!

A better way to go is next week try a conceptual piece about the NewArt Center office staff, your fellow artists, the walk to Walnut Street? Photograph with your phone camera and we'll print in the office and collage or transfer to canvas for painting? or presentation? Think about it, please.

See you next week, john. 

John Murray classes week of Oct. 15, 2012

Next week let's try a painting/object?drawing that functions as a diary page.

I've shown a painting I did to mark a day in San Diego in January 2006.

When I see this piece now I'm sent back in time and space to that day.

Art has such a transformative power on the maker.

Cave art was the start of human experiential recording and mystical  notation.

We are the same humans that marked the hunt and the progress of the stars.

Sometimes we just forget what we are.

see you next week, john.

John Murray classes week of Oct. 8, 2012

No class next Monday due to Columbus day festivities (a national day of mourning for American Indians).
Be that as it may, there are classes on Wed. the 10th (Supercharged Painting a.m. and p.m.).
I've shown above a painting I did a few weeks ago that I intend to work over next week in class.
If you have a painting that you are unhappy with why not try working over it. Retaining some areas and obliterating others. Some good work has been accomplished in this manner by many artists. See you next week, john.

John Murray classes week of Oct. 1, 2012

Anyone interested in a trip in January?

I've done this before (5 times) but not for a few years (below is a picture of Carol McMann, an artist who worked with me in Borrego for several workshops). It is an amazing place with perfect temperatures in January. Claudia is thinking of packaging the trip to save money and streamline it.Let her know if you are interested. My $ numbers and dates are only a guesstimate, so talk to her.

Next week let's try a self portrait in emotional and deconstructed fashion. What would that mean to your sense of identity? How deep is our "identity" and can we change it? How does this effect our painting language? Think about who you think you are and how this can be translated through the plasticity of paint and collage. see you next week, john.

Borrego Springs Desert Art Retreat and Workshop

Jan. 7?-11?, 2013 with painter/teacher John Murray.

Take a break from the quotidian and spend 5 days in the beautiful

California desert painting and art-making with an experimental artist and teacher and you’re talented and courageous peers. Fly to San Diego? And drive into the majestic low desert park of Anza Borrego Desert State Park. Home to Big Horn Sheep, Road Runners and Cougars Borrego is an amazing low-altitude desert surrounded by

mountains and vast vistas. John Murray has taught at NAC for 9 years

And works with artists in a unique and intense method that will help you find your visual language and further develop your art making.

A package price of $2500? Include round-trip flight, hotel room and workshop fees

Contact Claudia at NAC for more information     

John Murray classes week of Sept. 24, 2012

SUGARLEOPARDABSINTHSILVERPicasso's Dream



SILVER

The polished spoon-;

reflections slide

and spark.



ABSINTHE

In front of the canvas,

a flattened woman twists

and shatters.



LEOPARD

Deep in Montmartre,

an African merchant licks

his ivory teeth.



SUGAR

Wetting his brush, the artist parts

the sweet thighs of commerce-;

objects ring like good glass.



What do you make of this?

What can you make from this?

See you Monday. John

John Murray classes week of September 17, 2012

OUT OF THE RUINS 

 Reimagining the Romantic Tradition

Curated by Elizabeth Thact

Christopher Carroll

Clare Grill

Jane Fox Hipple

Fred H.C.Liang

Ryan McLennan

Gina Ruggeri

Marisa Tesauro

Elizabeth Thach

The one charm of the past is that it is the past.  ~Oscar Wilde

On walking into the gallery the first thing that struck me was the amount of empty space in the room.

Not dramatic space…negative space that seemed to have been forgotten by the curator.

The larger work seemed over-blown and technique heavy.

But amidst the ruins I found a few interesting and evocative pieces;

Christopher Carroll’s split screen video, passenger/pilot, was a powerful and humorous piece that portrayed him wading and investigating with a torch the dark negative space under a stone arch bridge in the Fenway.

Jane Fox Hipple’s, “Painted Bricks”, is a fresh and surprising treatise on expanding painting into sculpture, sort of a subtle and painterly Carl Andre.

The three small paintings by Clare Grill were not so much a comment on the English Romantic Tradition, but to me a welcoming (to a painter) exercise in Provisional Painting, a category of interest to me in my own work.

Sorry to say it, but that’s about all I found to think about in this academic exercise in “Art”.

I was reminded of my own experience in listening to Black Blues music as a young teenager. The African American musical tradition that arose in the Mississippi Delta in the 1920’s, and that I found profoundly moving and artistically exciting as a white kid, has been deserted by Black artists today.

I think it may have been Cornell West who said that Black people look forward, not back.

I would recommend that white elite artists do the same.  

After viewing this show, go upstairs and see Jasmine Chen’s fine small show of paintings, sort of a palette cleansing sherbet after a heavy meal.

If you want an assignment next week, view the two shows and paint a response!

See you next week, john. 

John Murray classes week of September 10, 2012

Welcome to Oil and Acrylic Workshop (Mon. am), John Murray Medley (Mon. pm) and Supercharged Painting (Wed. am and pm). 

Please check the supply list that the New Art Center sent you, and bring enough materials to work at the first class. 

In my  classes I try to provide an opening into a personal visual language by an investigation into materials, and a practice of experimental plastic manipulation. Of course one has to have an honest and sincere (well at least honest!) desire to provide a surprising visual moment. A strenuously self-critical mind and eye helps a lot, too. 

Sounds easy? 

In simpler less pretentious terms: Art is an Investigation into Itself.

So relax, have fun and see you the first week of class.

Thank you for taking my class, John

www.jmurrayart.com 

John murray classes week of August 27, 2012

It's the last week of Summer term. What a great studio experience this has been for me!
The summer evenings in that studio resonate with a quiet creative energy. Some excellent work has been done.
This summer I've been reading "Finnegan's Wake" by James Joyce. I've read all his other work over the last 50 years, but have always been unable to deal with the postmodern experimental language conceits of this work, so I'm trying again. This time I'm enjoying it in small doses. Below is a portrait of Joyce I did a few years ago and an excerpt form the novel. The going can be rough, but the pay-off in humor and profundity is there for the patient reader. If you're up for a challenge to close the term read the excerpt and try your hand at a visual response. see you next week, john.

O here here how hoth sprowled met the
duskt the father of fornicationists but, (O my shining stars and
body!) how hath fanespanned most high heaven the skysign of
soft advertisement! But was iz? Iseut? Ere were sewers? The oaks
of ald now they lie in peat yet elms leap where askes lay. Phall if
you but will, rise you must: and none so soon either shall the
pharce for the nunce come to a setdown secular phoenish.

John Murray classes week of August 20, 2012

IT'S ALWAYS SUMMER ON THE INSIDE: As Roberta Smith said about this exhibit; "This show at Anton Kern Gallery in Manhattan takes its title from a 1970s wet-suit advertisement. Catch the phrase’s suggestion of interiority — of the freewheeling mind and imagination as the main source of artistic inspiration. Beyond the varied and engaging ways these works converse with one another, each manages to add a further bit of resonance and rightness to the title".

That's how this class has felt to me every night. Some terrific work has been accomplished and we still have 2 more weeks to go. Go online and take a look at some of the work in the show and then try taking the spirit of that theme and painting your response. See you next week, john. 

John Murray classes week of August 13, 2012

We had a male model last Wed. and some really strong painting was accomplished by artists who attended.

This week I would like to get beyond the retinal rods and cones and skin of the illusion and strip down to the skeletal structure of the figure and the painting. What does that mean? Well above is a painting by Les Rogers that does that with that old chestnut "Skeleton and Cigarette". Check Rogers' work online and a show at Half Gallery, "Summer Swells" on the Lower East Side. Art-making is a constantly challenging occupation, but it can be fun!

See you next week, john.  

John Murray classes week of August 6 2012

Wed. the 8th we will have a model (male)  I have been unable to get one for Mon. this term.

If you are signed up for Mon. and want to work from a model please call the office (617 964 3424) and make arrangements to attend that additional class. My recently discovered interest in the work of Francis Bacon pushed me to get a male model, something I rarely do, and I hope you find the male body an interesting metaphorical starting point. We will; however have to pay the model ourselves since there was no model fee included in tuition for the Summer terms. See you next week. john.

John Murray classes week of July 30, 2012

from Cabbage Gardens

from Cabbage Gardens

By Susan Howe b. 1937 Susan Howe

The past

will overtake   

alien force   

our house   

formed

of my mind   

to enter

explorer

in a forest   

of myself

for all

my learning   

Solitude

quiet

and quieter   

fringe

of trees

by a river

bridges black   

on the deep   

the heaving sea   

a watcher stands

to see her ship   

winging away   

Thick noises

merge in moonlight   

dark ripples   

dissolving

and

defining

spheres

and

snares

             Place of importance as in the old days

stood on the ramparts of the fort

                                                 the open sea outside   

alone with water-birds and cattle

                        knee-deep in a stream

grove of reeds

               herons watching from the bank

henges

      whole fields honeycombed with souterrains   

human

                        bones through the gloom

       whose sudden mouth

surrounded my face

                      a thread of blue around the coast   

                                                         feathery moon   

eternity swallows up time

                                     peaceable as foam

                        O cabbage gardens

summer’s elegy

                        sunset survived

Welcome to the first week of  Late Summer Supercharged Painting.

Here's a Summer-ish poem in the postmodern genre of poet Susan Howe. It is full of imagery.

I wonder if you can find a painting here. An unfamiliar picture that explores the surprising world of visual juxtaposition and Postmodern surrealism. 

John Murray classes week of July 23, 2012

547 West 21st Street, Chelsea
Through Aug. 3
This inspired show is accompanied by a brochure that mimics the cover design of “October,” the left-leaning bible of art theory, and has a title to match. But the ideas therein are derived from the brothers Chico, Groucho, Gummo, Harpo and Zeppo.
Organized by Jacob and Jens Hoffmann, the exhibition is partly a sincere tribute; ample space is devoted to Marx Brothers films, photographs and ephemera. In the entrance corridor are two paintings by Harpo, including a charmingly folksy view of a bullring.
Also here, however, are wisecracking works by four contemporary artists and one modern one (Duchamp, naturally). Some of these figures, like Rodney Graham, are known as pranksters in their own right; others merely share a target with the Marxes, as is apparent when Jack Goldstein’s looped film of the MGM lion, “Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer” (1975), is screened opposite the classic bit in which Groucho, Chico and Harpo roar and squeak.
In Richard Prince’s painting series “You Bet Your Life,” mustaches, noses and eyebrows become floating compositional elements: Groucho glasses envisioned by Malevich, perhaps. They’re joined by Duchamp’s well-known Mona Lisa with a mustache, “L.H.O.O.Q.,” which in this context looks more goofy than ribald.

The youngest artist here, Tim Lee, made a two-monitor video installation specifically for the show. Based on the mirror scene in “Duck Soup,” it shows Mr. Lee mimicking his own movements from one screen to another and is a wonderfully subtle bit of slapstick. It reminds you that humor is an underrated ingredient in Conceptual art, as does a quote from Groucho that’s stenciled on the gallery wall: “If any form of pleasure is exhibited, report to me, and it will be prohibited.”

Next week  try a painting of the Marx Brothers or Uncle Karl. See you then, john.

John Murray classes week of July 16, 2012

Next week my wife, Mary, and I have tickets to Cirque Du Soleil on Wednesday night, so Bill StGeorge will be covering the class for me that night.

Monday I will be there and thought a Picasso acrobat idea might interest you. The stark and simple figure I uploaded is a great minimalist example of how complexity can be handled and composed. The incredible positions that gymnasts and acrobats can achieve are beautifully expressed in a compressed black and white design.
Next week try a simplified picture of a complex subject: a car, a person, a face, a figure, an animal and do it in black and white. See you next week. john. 

John Murray classes week of July 11, 2012

It's Summer! I've always loved this 1939 Picasso painting, "Night fishing at Antibes". A great description of a spooky activity with all the beauty and terror of a Summer adventure. Of course while Picasso was painting it, Hitler was invading Poland and the Holocaust and the world were about to explode. Life is beyond the artist's control but our work is ours...next week try a picture of a powerful (to you) Summer experience...don't be literal, take the concept and describe it in PAINT. See you next week, john.

John Murray classes week of July 2, 2012

Don't forget the Plastic Fantastic workshop on Thurs and Fri this week...there's still room to attend.

The NY Times Fri. Art section has an amazing review today of a number of painting shows in Manhatten. 

Painting is alive and well and it is a brilliant way to internalize existence, while acting in the real world of material and friction. The work above is by Judith Scott at James Cohan, a Down Syndrome artist who is part of the show "Everyday Abstract-Abstract Everyday" at James Cohan Gallery. The blue painting is mine, Spirit Spout", which is inspired by a reading of a chapter in Moby Dick. Painting Rules! Show me how you are excited by its possibilities next week. Do a piece that incorporates your life, your point-of-view in a bold unapologetic way--any material, any size...I love Judith Scott's use of a chair, for instance. See you Mon. No class Wed. due to holiday. Workshop all day Thurs and Fri. john.  

John Murray workshop and Summer classes

I will be having a 2-day workshop "Plastic Fantastic" on July 5 and 6th. It's an experimental investigation into all aspects of acrylic painting. I've done this workshop before and it's a blast.
Also my Summer-long classes begin on the 25th of June and are every Mon and Wed 4:30-8:30 pm, a great time to work in a big open studio as the evocative summer evening drifts in and the stars appear.  Signup and I'll see you then. Happy Solstice! john.

John Murray classes week of June 11, 2012

Last week of the term! Please bring any work for crit.

John murray classes week of June 4, 2012

I'm in DC and just saw the Ai Weiwei fountain at the Hirshorn. Great piece, inspired by the Qing Dynasty zodiac clock (Garden of Perfect Brightness) royal retreat near Beijing, that was destroyed in 1860. Strange and strong piece. How do you feel about the post-modern idea of co-option of  images?

Do a piece about this idea either pro or con. see you next week. john

John Murray classes week of May 28, 2012

I noticed the work of Aaron Curry at Micheal Werner in New York and found what I saw online to be tough and compelling. The references to cartoons and postmodern comics, cave art and freewheeling visual connections looked very creative and smart. If you have a chance take a look online and see what you think. He uses the photos of the walls of his studio and sets cutout Calderish shapes and paint-smattered image in front of them. Nice feel to what I can see. 

For your own work this week try a justaposition of studio spatters and markings against shapes and drawings, perhaps what you drew from the stilllife of last week or the model from the week before. Combine and elaborate your personal viewpoint into a dense insistence on yourself. See you next week, john. 

John Murray classes week of May 21, 2012

The idea of working from a still life setup is alien to me and too easy on the artist in my opinion, but I have been asked by an artist in my DeCordova  class to do so. I will bring a few odd pieces to arrange in each class and you can use the setup or work from your mind, (a dangerous place). See you next week, john.

john Murray classes week of May 14, 2012

DeCordova class will have a model. Please bring a new canvas or surface on which to work.

NewArt Center, please work further from drawings and marks you developed last week with the model. Deconstruct, collage drawings, transfer or otherwise push the image of the figure. see you next week, john.  

John Murray classes week of May 7, 2012

NewArt Center classes have a model in every class next week.

Thank you NewArt Center artists for my surprise birthday party, card and generous $!

I was overwhelmed and very appreciative. Thank you Karen!

DeCordova artists keep working on your ouvre and current visual-psycho-obsessions.

On may 12 ( a week from Saturday I'm bringing a group to the ICA for a tour and irreverent look at the contents of that bastion of bourgeois-postmodern-plasticity. Call the office at NewArtcenter to signup and join the fun. see you next week. john. 

John Murray classes week of April 30, 2012

There is a show of Frank Stella's early work (straight out'a Princeton!), what a child of privledge this artist was. He is, however, supremely talented and powerfully original.  

Go on line or take a look at the NYTimes WeekendArts  section (Fri. April 27) and see what Roberta Smith has to say about this work. I love his Moby Dick series from the 1990's and his lectures from 1988 at Harvard published as "Working Space are excellent reading for a painter.

Next week consider a mininal work, perhaps your initial in stripes in some fashion, or a combination of stripes and image. See you next week john.

John murray classes week of April 23, 2012

There is an interesting show at the Brooklyn Museum

There is a new and interesting show at the Brooklyn Museum called "Connecting Cultures"
If you have a chance go online and view some of the amazing objects on display.
For instance this 900 A.D. Huaxtec stone carving of a young man, the back of which shows the future of all youth: Death.
Welcome back deCordova artists (after a month off), as well as artists new to my class.
Also Newart Center artists (after a week  off). Next week let's try a piece that shows this life/death concept in some way: this idea has been around in all cultures for as long as we have been human and aas infinite visual possibilities. see you next week, john.

No John Murray classes week of April 16, 2012

The NewArt Center is closed next week.
Enjoy your week off. Here are 2 shots of the class project that artists have been playing with for the last 2 weeks. I remember seeing a painted wooden skid in a German gallery 30

years ago and when I saw a skid out behind the studio a few weeks ago I thought that we could do one too. It still needs more work and paint application, but it's beginning look intentional.

Still too fragmented: perhaps more simplified in paint application. That can wait until the end when we'll edit it and hopefully submit it to the June Student/Faculty show. In the meantime lets "right-brain" it for awhile. Have a great week, check this blog again next Friday (April 20th). John.

John Murray classes week of April 9, 2012

This week let's try a self-portrait.

A great way to face yourself and take a few chances.

On May 12, a saturday, I'm taking a group to the ICA, the office has the information... it should be informative and fun. I hope you can join me. Charline Von Heyl, the artist shown on the left here is showing as well as the color show. I like the look of Von Heyl's work and am excited to see it in the flesh. See you next week, john.

John Murray classes week of April 2, 2012

Welcome to the Spring term at New Art Center.

I have been in D.C. for the last few days and seen some great art at the Hirshhorn Museum.

I saw, and for the first time visually understood, Francis Bacon. After years of not getting his work and writing it off as over-rated, I was blown away by his pictures, especially his portraits of Van Gogh. The brutal brush work, the economically achieved light and shade, the acknowledgement of the linen ground and the diverse play of viscosity and scumble are amazingly beautiful and existentially powerful. I have ordered a book of Bacon's paintings from Amazon and will bring it to class when I recieve it. Tonight I'm going to the Hirshhorn at sunset to watch the Doug Aitken illumination of the entire facade of the building called "Song/1". Described as "liquid architecture" it is supposed to blend images and sound and transform the urban landscape. Should be interesting. Next week for the first class try a piece that in some way records an experience you recently had where your perceptions were changed: a situation or reconsideration of long-held opinion, or an insight into a visual or aural experience. Any medium on any surface, flat, relief or 3D. See you next week, john.