John Murray classes week of January 6, 2014

Welcome to my Winter 2014 (!) term classes.
I believe that the form/material  that you choose to explore is all you really need for content.
But since we're stuck here in New England in January let's look around and find a little inspiration in the
bleakness we inhabit.
Take a look at Cy Twombley's paintings and sculpture.
Look up Andy Goldsworthy's snowball/stick drawing.
I took the above picture on a walk in a field near my house on a very cold day.
Is there a personal image there?
I don't know until the materials get involved.
Please bring material to work with to the first class.
See you next week, John.

John Murray classes week of December 9, 2013

Last week's Solstice work was strong, so let's continue on that theme next week.

It is also the last week of the term, so if you have any work that you want to share or have critiqued , please bring it to class.

I enjoyed working with everyone this term and hope you found the class a positive and challenging experience.

The winter term starts January 6, 2014(!).

See you next week, John.

John Murray classes December 2 and 4, 2013

Who is this man?

Find out next week when Dan Elias visits my classes at lunch break Monday and Wednesday...
Stick around after morning class or come a little early for the afternoon class and meet our new director, ask him questions and offer suggestions for his consideration for NAC.
 
In terms of an assignment try thinking visually about the WINTER SOLSTICE and its attendant phenonena in regard to the bleak landscape, the clear cold nights, and the turning of the planet away from the Sun.
See you next week. John

John Murray classes Nov. 18, 20 and 25, 2013

For the next 3 days of classes before the holiday I would like to stay with the scrap photo reference work of last week.
Above is a photo of Francis Bacon in his studio surrounded by scraps of reference that he cut from newspapers, magazines and found in trash cans.
The work the classes did from this assignment on Wed. was fresh and different:
let's stay with for a while longer.
See you next week, john.

John Murray classes week of Nov. 11, 2013

No Monday class due to Veteran's Day.

For Wednesday Supercharged painting:
Next week try working from a newspaper or magazine photo.
Of course the usual deconstruction/manipulation of the image into painterly terms is essential!
Above are 2 examples: Theophilus Brown's (a Bay Area figurative painter) 1956 football painting worked
from a sports photo and below that a painting that I did in the Summer of 2011 from a baseball photo.
Many great modernist and postmodernist painters work from published images.
Francis Bacon did it all the time.
See you next week. John.

John Murray classes week of November 4, 2013

Last week's destruction/collaboration work was very strong.

Next week let's try a painting usinig paint rollers.
A limited method can open a wider vision.

See you next week, John.

John Murray classes week of October 28, 2013

Last week's found object challenge went well; above is what I did around a crushed piece of drain pipe and some burlap fabric.

Friday's Times had a great review by Blake Gopnik of a show at the Hirschorn Museum in DC of the Destruction Movement in art in the 60's and 70's.

I will see the show in November when I go to Washington... but the review mentioned a piece by Robert Rauschenberg, included in the show, that is his famous erased Dekooning drawing. 

This inspired next week assignment: I will setup a still life for you to paint draw or otherwise replicate and then ask you (or your neighbor) to destoy, erase or obscure in an interesting and graphic fashion.

See you next week, John.

John Murray classes week of October 21, 2013

Next week find an object (above is my flattened drain spout) and work from that piece in some way: paint it attach it, draw it, deconstruct it, photocopy, photograph  it, build an altar for it.

Picasso turned a bicycle seat into a bull's head!

See you next week, john.

John Murray classes week of Oct. 14, 2013

No class on Monday, the 14th, Columbus Day.
Remember that the native population dropped by 50% within a few years after European contact.

Wednesday classes please continue with work on previous assignments and your own experiments.

John Murray classes week of October, 7, 2013

Good work by all artists the last two weeks.
I loved the cardboard surface paintings and assemblages!
Let's keep the work rolling next week.
Find an older photo of yourself and deconstruct it in a painting, drawing, assemblage or combination of all mediums.
Likeness is not the point of this assignment...find a plastic approach and see if it leads to a higher truth about yourself and nostalgia for the past...sort of a Proustian exercise for painters/artists.

 See you next week. John.

John Murray classes week of September 30, 2013

Next week let's work on corrugated cardboard and see how that effects our vision.

A cheap and beautiful surface for experimental painting, many artists have used it with strong results.

Robert Rauschenberg's  work on cardboard used the material with logos, stamps and tape very unprocessed and fresh...others have applied paint, cut, folded and sprayed. 

What will you do? Please bring in boxes and pieces of any and all cardboard that you like.

Also, we will assemble the right-brain, non-dominant hand paintings and drawings that we did last week and see what was created and what we can make of it all. 

See you next week, john.

John Murray classes week of September 23, 2013

Second week of the Autumn Term!
Last week was exciting for me: new artists in class, fresh ideas and approaches.
NEXT WEEK: I would like to try a series of drawing/paintings on paper by every member of the class, which can be assembled into a single work the following week.
Every piece should be done with the artist's non-dominant hand!
Let's see what the collective unconscious of a class of artists looks like.

See you next week, john.

John Murray classes week of September 16, 2013

WELCOME TO OIL AND ACRYLIC WORKSHOP, POSTMODERN ASSEMBLAGE & PAINTING AND SUPERCHARGED PAINTING!

I appreciate your interest in my classes and passion for Art.

The Autumn 2013 term offers an opportunity to struggle with the daunting task of self-expression and plastic

investigation: you must have both to truly become an artist. If one had to ignore one of these however; I  would say skip the self -expression for awhile and pour yourself into material investigation. 

With that in mind I would like to offer an assignment for the first few classes: bring in a substance that you have never worked with before and see where it leads you (or doesn't).

See you next week, John

John Murray classes week of August 26, 2013

End of Summer session.

Next week is the last two nights of Supercharged Painting/Summer.

It went by so fast.

I saw a lot of good work this season and had a chance to explore some ideas

of my own as well.

The sadness that comes with the turning of the Earth away from the Sun is an ancient human

feeling. Our childhood memories of Summer and the seeming endlessness of long hot days is with us 

still.

I hope you join the class this Autumn and continue to paint and think for yourself.

See you next week, John. 

John Murray classes week of August 19, 2013

Art is an improvisational exploration. 
Like dancing or boxing, art is a study that in the moment of creation is forgotten.
Read, think, then forget and act.
See you next week, John.

John Murray classes week of August 12, 2013

The figure/ground dicotomy.

I have been thinking a lot about figure/ground issues and felt it would be a

good time to have the class consider and investigate the strange and illusionistic

world of this phenomena.

As the critic, Clement Greenberg said; “All painting is flat”.

Meanwhile he went on to ceaselessly promote the, at times highly

layered and spacially complex work, of Jackson Pollack. 

As soon as one makes a mark on a canvas the mind begins to see a hollow space

behind and around the gesture.

The only way around this phenomenon is to coat the canvas in a thick flat layer of paint.

This is essentially what color field painters do.

The cost of truth to the flatness of the picture plane requires one to give up most spacial play.

Modernism and its true believers aside, I feel that the illusion of space generally adds to the

power of a picture, as long as that is not its only conceit, I say let it rip!

Think about what you're doing a bit. One must have awareness to be a good artist.

Here is a picture I did last week that investigates these issues for me.

See you next week, John.

John Murray classes week of August 5, 2013

Dressed in rough bags

of burlap the prince sees

the future

turning to his valet

he farts loudly and quickly

leaves the meadow

after that life

stopped being one

ceremony after all

began to find mice in the

fields to talk to and cry with

tell about his death at the hands of his

right hand 

-John Murray 2013

Mid-Summer largess finds the artist in need of inspiration!

Next week scour your mind and heart for new forms of expression.

See you next week. john. 

John Murray classes week of July 29, 2013

New Summer term!

The new term: the same only better!

Next week try an image from the sea shore...

above is my "Crab".

See you next week, john.

John Murray classe week of July 22, 2013

Who do we think we are?

Identity is a trap for artrists.

Over my years of teaching art I have found that the most boring and tightly precious artists are the ones that are the most worried about my making marks on their work.

With that in mind I was pleased to read a review/description in Friday's Times by Roberta Smith for a show called "Work" at Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery in New York.

Sara Greenberger Rafferty curated a show of work from a workshop she did in Mich. last year where everyone worked in factory-like process on the same paintings in a collaborative way.

The show will be up until the 27th of July.

See you next week. john.

John Murray classes week of July 15, 2013

Next week let's develop a landscape abstraction.
Above is a painting I did last week in class that is my view of Interstate 90 as it crosses Canada and heads west toward the Pacific!
One of the great aspects of art is that it lets you travel the world and mind for very little $.
See  the work of Charles Burchfield (below) to see what a boring neighborhood in upstate New York can be turned into with a set of paints and imagination.
See you next week, John.

John Murray classes week of July 8, 2013

Great work that answers many questions about art!

The Shape of the World Passing Before His Eyes

Bill Traylor Finally Gets a Spotlight in New York.... Shape of the World Passing Before His Eyes Bill Traylor is the subject of two exhibitions at the American Folk Art Museum. 

One day Traylor picked up a stub of pencil and a scrap of cardboard and began to draw. Over the next three or four years, alternating between memories of sharecropping and what he saw before him, he produced hundreds of drawings and paintings that rank among the greatest works of the 20th century. Traylor was a natural stylist and a born storyteller who pushed images of the life around him toward abstraction with no loss of vivacity. At once modern and archaic, his art offers proof of Jung’s collective unconscious but also of an indelible individual talent.

Traylor’s efforts exist because within days of making his first drawing, he acquired a devoted admirer: Charles Shannon (1914-96), a young white artist from Montgomery who began visiting him every week, bringing art supplies, buying some drawings and taking others for safekeeping, since it was apparent that they would otherwise not survive.

One is grateful to Charles Shannon’s keen eye and devotion when viewing the side-by-side shows of Traylor’s work at the American Folk Art Museum. “Bill Traylor: Drawings From the Collections of the High Museum of Art and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts,” a traveling exhibition making its final stop, includes nearly all of the Traylors owned by the two institutions of its title. (The 29 from the Montgomery museum were a gift from Shannon.) “Traylor in Motion: Wonders From New York Collections” in an excellent in-house effort organized by Stacy C. Hollander, the American Folk Art Museum’s chief curator, and Valérie Rousseau, its new curator of self-taught art and Art Brut, who have also overseen the guest exhibition’s stop here.

The first in-depth examination of Traylor’s achievement in a New York museum, these shows present a total of 104 drawings and paintings in combinations of graphite, pencil, colored pencil, crayon, ink, watercolor  and poster paint, on salvaged cardboard and paper. They offer total immersion in his late-life burst of genius, albeit under crowded conditions that sometimes inhibit full appreciation.

Traylor’s images depict mostly black people but also some whites, capturing a world that seems eternally fraught: the animals alert, the people wary. The mood is tightly wound, sometimes antic.

One possible source for his sharp-edged, implicitly geometric figures is weather vanes, although his silhouettes are considerably enlivened with distinctive textures, expressive button eyes, a sense of fluid movement and bright color. His characters include elders who sit in chairs or walk with canes, younger folk who dance, cavort on rooftops, raise barns, drink from flasks or argue. There are assorted dogs that snarl or just nose around, and lots of birds and livestock, especially bulls, horses, mules and pigs that are seen in profile, posing for markedly affectionate portraits. Sometimes Traylor’s figures perch, climb or even merge with abstract shapes that have come to be called constructions and can suggest blacksmiths’ anvils. 

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

The self-taught artist Bill Traylor preferred to work on salvaged, sometimes irregularly shaped cardboard, as can be seen in the works on display at the American Folk Art Museum. 

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

The self-taught artist Bill Traylor preferred to work on salvaged, sometimes irregularly shaped cardboard, as can be seen in the works on display at the American Folk Art Museum. 

See you next week. john.

John Murray classes

John Murray Immersion Workshop June 24-28

At Montserrat College of Art

“Art is an investigation into its own possibilities”

Thank you for taking the workshop here is a basic supply list:

Paints (oil or acrylic or both)

Canvas (6-10 different sizes from small to as large as you can transport), panel, metal or paper as a surface

Charcoal, fixative

Mediums for oil or acrylic (if acrylic I recommend Utrecht’s

Acrylic gel as well as Gac 500 and tar gel)

Any other material you might be interested in for still life reference, collage, embellishment… etc

Here is an approximate plan (very approximate!) for the week:

Monday June 24, 9am:

Introductions of artists and discussion of goals for each artist and my concepts of painting/art/teaching.

Develop working sketches in charcoal for first pieces

Critique sketches and discuss execution in terms of medium, scale and alternate approaches

Begin work

Tuesday, June 25, 9am:

Paint, discuss, critique most of the day

Wednesday, June 26, 9am:

We will have a model for most of the day as well as a continuation of work under way, I would like to draw and deconstruct from the figure, face and form to use for incorporation in on going pieces and for new work

Thursday, June 27, 9am:

Paint, assemble, discuss and critique

Friday, June 28, 9am:

Paint assemble, discuss and critque.

Review work produced during week.

Sent from my iPhone

Begin forwarded message:

From: Montserrat College of Art <shelton.walker@montserrat.edu>
Date: May 28, 2013, 5:30:12 PM EDT
To: jmurray924@comcast.net
Subject: There's still time to register for painting with John Murray!
Reply-To: shelton.walker@montserrat.edu

summer immersive art workshops featured artist john murray    Murray has lived in Los Angeles, Provincetown and Boston. For more than 40 years he has explored his bleak/sensual aesthetic through paints and mediums of all descriptions, as well as printmaking and assemblages. He studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, and exhibits widely throughout the North East. jmurrayart.com   Save 10% There's still time to register! Plus, if you refer a friend for John Murray's workshop, we'll give you a %10 discount off your own tuition! Contact us for more details, and reference this email.  Hurry!  Registration for John's course will close soon! week-long art workshops june 10 - july 12 From painting and fiber arts to comics and creative writing, our diverse summer immersives are designed to allow participants time and instruction to explore new avenues of creative inquiry. We invite you to spend your summer devoted to your art in the unique environment that only a working art college can offer. For details on all our course offerings, visit our website here.   apply now!   Visit our website or contact us at ce@montserrat.edu or 978 921 4242 x 1202 to learn more.

Forward email This email was sent to jmurray924@comcast.net by shelton.walker@montserrat.edu |   Update Profile/Email Address | Instant removal with SafeUnsubscribe™ | Privacy Policy. Montserrat College of Art | 23 Essex Street | Beverly | MA | 01915

John Murray classes week of June 3, 2013

Summer!
Next week do an image that signifies summer to you....examples : above a painting of a swim that I did around the breakwater in Rockport...yours might be an image of a gin and tonic, a shade filled forest by a lake, the blazing sun at midday...a collage that includes melted tar?
See you next week, john.

John Murray classes week of May 27, 2013

Coming from cold wet sea going

to warm inn eating hot soup of comfort away from drenched rock sand and fir too wet for fire even slippery passway down to crashing surf beach wind across plateau sky pouring rain or wild fox cries hawks wheeling gulls...crying buffeted now enclosed by comfort and smallness out there grandness sense of pain connection

death needed for life

No classes Monday.
Wednesday classes only.

See you Wednesday,
I am in Acadia National Park....constant rain and wind...gorgeous place and time.

John Murray classes week of May 20, 2013

This week try a piece based on a cartoon or fairy tale character.
Take a look at Paul McCarthy's "Snow White Bookends"...amazing thing...beyond our context and conception, but still based on the fairy tale truisms. When I saw this in Friday's Times I fell in love with the crazy ambition and self-indulgence of McCarthy's work!
His work is gross and clever, beautiful and ugly...I love it.
On Wednesday I (and New Art Center) have an opening at Newtv on Needham Street in Newton at 7 pm.
please come and tell me what you think of my recent paintings, 26 of them in this show.
Thank you Kathleen and Stacy for your instigation, help and consultation on this event.
See you next week. John.

John Murray classes week of May 13, 2013

An interesting young artist...

Trudy Benson’s paintings directly evolve out of her relationship with rudimentary graphic programs such as Windows Paint and Brushes. Her original influence is founded in memories of exploring MacPaint on an old Mac SE as a child. The paintings found in PAINT blend perfectly Benson’s affinity to abstract painting and modern technology while also exploring a dialogue with classical painting motifs such as the venus pudica. There is an interesting hybrid of influence layered within these paintings, which at first glance can appear as a simple collage of abstract information. The artist’s shapes and strokes of the paintbrush adhere to no sense of gravity and a viewer will not find any horizon line to help position him or herself within the work. The longer an individual stands before one of Trudy Benson’s works the more the canvas reveals itself to the viewer a realm which exists uniquely between the digital and physical worlds.

Benson’s paintings like a computer screen contain a strange sense of flattened, shallow space. Yet, her heavy application of paint and materials places a viewer in a visual playground of real and illusionary space, which is not contained in the digital counterpart. The artist’s exploration of space in painting continues with her adaptation of the city’s technique of cleaning up graffiti in neighborhoods, where large paint rollers are used to “paint out” the graffiti. The graffiti removal technique functions similarly to the notion of a ‘portable hole,’ a visual trope that Benson is also engaging in this new body of work. Benson utilizes the masking of an under painting, or censuring like in the venus pudica, to draw more attention and inquiry to what is hidden beneath the newest layer of paint. To unlock this exhibition it is key to make note of the artist’s use of “reductive techniques, which contain an additive value.” There is no edit > undo for Trudy Benson’s paintings. Every layer and texture of the canvas is embraced; each painting rendering an honest tangible representation of it’s own history.

Try moving the origin of your next painting to a different place. See you next week, john.

John Murray classes week of May 6, 2013

Spacial development in a painting.

Next week try to push the sense of spaciality in your work.
You can attain this with layering and viscosity changes across the surface: for instance start your work with charcoal drawing, fix and add a layer of translucent wash in a warm color, then repeat charcoal, fix again and move to opaque areas of color...this requires some patience, especially with oil paint, but will provide a sense of space behind the picture plane.
In concert with this exercise go on line and read what Hans Hoffman and Clement Greenberg had to say on this issue.
Illusory space in a painting has been a hotly debated issue since the advent of 20th Century Modernism, but has pretty much fallen by the wayside in the Post Modern era, where anything goes and the flatness versus 3D glasses debate has little place in the radical methods of current art making.
See you next week, john.

John Murray classes week of April

Next week please try a piece (painting /drawing/assemblage/construction/installation or phone videos) that make a statement about April/May...

see you next week, john.  

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965)
The Waste Land (1922)

Workers and farmers unite
You have nothing,to lose
But your chains
The world is to win
This is May Day! May!
Your armies are veining the earth!

Railways and highways have tied
Blood of farmland and town
And the chains
Speed wheat to machine
This is May Day! May!
The poor's armies veining the earth!

Hirers once fed by the harried
Cannot feed them their hire
Nor can chains
Hold the hungry in
This is May Day! May!
The poor are veining the earth!

Light lights in air blossoms red
Like nothing on earth
Now the chains
Drag graves to lie in
This is May Day! May!
The poor's armies are veining the earth!

March comrades in revolution
From hirer unchained
Till your gain
Be the freedom of all
The World's May Day! May!
May of the Freed of All the Earth! 

John Murray classes week of April 22, 2013

We will have a model all classes this week.

Try and use a new medium as well as painting and drawing.

The traditional nude has been worked too much (although sometimes with great success) so as a thinking artist try and push yourself past the familiar and enter new and dangerous territory...of course take the opportunity to draw while we have the model, but try assemblage, collageor printmaking.

Of course painting is encouraged!

See you next week, john.