John Murray classes week of Jan 21, 2013

Monday is the National celebration of the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr.
When I was a young Marine stationed in the south in the early 1960's, someone burned a cross on our platoon's front lawn. We had more Black Marines in our company than most other and that fact provoked the racist act. When on liberty with Black friends they couldn't join us Whites in diners or use the same public restrooms nor could they drink from the same water coolers. What a change in American society...a black President!
In human affairs things do get better sometimes.
There are no classes Mon, but Wed supercharged Painting morning and afternoon is running.

See next week, john.

John Murray classes week of Jan.14, 2013

Nam June Paik at the Smithsonian.

I’ve long loved Nam June Paik’s work and wondered if his humor and visual concepts could work for you in your art.

Last week the assignment suggestion was a self portrait and reading a review in the Friday Jan.11 NYT, and seeing his Buddah contemplating his own image got me wondering if you might also contemplate your self portrait and see where that leads you.

Perhaps a change of media: to sculpture or a color copy of  last weeks work that you can transfer to a new canvas or cardboard and paint again. Or take a video with your phone and work from that (send it to others in the class, I can provide you with most emails).

One of my favorite local examples of Nam June Paik's work is at the deCordova Museum Sculpture Park; "Requiem for the 20^th Century", try and visit the museum and see it for yourself. Tell me what you think.

Go online and look at other examples of his work.

Nam June Paik died in 2006 but his work lives on for us.

See you next week, john.

John Murray classes week of Jan 7, 2013

Welcome all artists in Oil and Acrylic Workshop, John Murray Medley and Supercharged Painting wed am and pm!
Thank you for taking my classes this Winter term at NAC..

Let's start the term off with a self portrait.
I know it seems so obvious, but it has been an art tradition for centuries that still works for me.
Every artist may feel that they are not much, but at the same time to be honest, all they think about.
It is just human nature.
My wife is always telling me that she wishes that every male figure/head that I do is not a self portrait.
I can't help myself, so why not embrace the concept?
The amazing plasticity of painting makes the subject matter immaterial, so anything that gets the process started works for contemporary art.
Please bring paint and canvas, palette, brushes and rags if you are new to the class. And a sense of adventure.
Happy New Year, john.

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?