John Murray classes week of January 19, 2015

Check out the interesting show at MOMA.

Finally something I can relate to!

See you next week, John.

Forever Now presents the work of 17 artists whose paintings reflect a singular approach that characterizes our cultural moment at the beginning of this new millennium: they refuse to allow us to define or even meter our time by them. This phenomenon in culture was first identified by the science fiction writer William Gibson, who used the term “a-temporality” to describe a cultural product of our moment that paradoxically doesn’t represent, through style, through content, or through medium, the time from which it comes. A-temporality, or timelessness, manifests itself in painting as an ahistorical free-for-all, where contemporaneity as an indicator of new form is nowhere to be found, and all eras coexist. This profligate mixing of past styles and genres can be identified as a kind of hallmark for our moment in painting, with artists achieving it by reanimating historical styles or recreating a contemporary version of them, sampling motifs from across the timeline of 20th-century art in a single painting or across an oeuvre, or radically paring their language down to the most archetypal forms.

The artists in this exhibition represent a wide variety of styles and impulses, but all use the painted surface as a platform, map, or metaphoric screen on which genres intermingle, morph, and collide. Their work represents traditional painting, in the sense that each artist engages with painting’s traditions, testing and ultimately reshaping historical strategies like appropriation and bricolage and reframing more metaphysical, high-stakes questions surrounding notions of originality, subjectivity, and spiritual transcendence.

The exhibition includes works by Richard Aldrich, Joe Bradley, Kerstin Brätsch, Matt Connors, Michaela Eichwald, Nicole Eisenman, Mark Grotjahn, Charline von Heyl, Rashid Johnson, Julie Mehretu, Dianna Molzan, Oscar Murillo, Laura Owens, Amy Sillman, Josh Smith, Mary Weatherford, and Michael Williams.

John Murray classes week of January 12, 2015

Next week let's see what you can do with removal.

The act of removing, scraping and washing out pigment is as important as applying it.
Above is a Matisse portrait of a young woman painted (scratched) 100 years ago, it still is just as striking and radical as anything painted today.
On the night of February 5, I will be giving a talk at NAC on Matisse and his radical view of painting in those years.

For now, see you next week, John  

John Murray classes week of January 5, 2015

Happy New Year 2015 and welcome to my classes.
I would like to start the term with a suggested assignment.
Think of a personal adventure that you have had, preferably as a child and try an image based on the emotional load of that experience.
Don't be concerned with an accuracy, drawing or figuration.
Be free and loose.
Below are a few of mine and the childhood experience related to them.

I was 10 years old when myself and another boy decided to swim across Quincy Bay from Wollaston Beach to Squantum MA.
We set out late in the afternoon and swam until the last of the moored boats and the open water began.
At that point the other kid,whose name I can not remember,decided to swim back to shore.
I wanted to push on, and did.
The water got deeper and choppier more oceanic as I swam.
The Long Island bridge loomed ahead in the distance. 
The rocky shore of Squantum was very far in my view from low in the water.
The fishy smell of the east wind tide filled my senses. 
Sharks,whales,blackfish all sprang  to mind from the depths beneath my blue cold feet.
At last I reached the barnacle encrusted boulders of the Squantum shore. 
I had landed on the back yard of an ocean front house barefoot and clothed only in a small boys bathing suit. 
I scrambled out of the water and looked back toward across the bay from where I had come. 
The original shoreline appeared as a scumble of buildings and masts a long way off in the late afternoon light.
It must have been 5:30 on a late summer afternoon and I had no stomach for swimming back shivering and tired.
It was close to supper time and I had to get home fast,not in another 1 1/2 hours, the time it had taken me to swim across the bay.
I ran up through the yards and found a street. 
I stuck my thumb out and was soon picked up by a middle-aged man in a sedan. 
He drove me the 3 or so miles around the peninsular to Wollaston beach.
I thanked him and ran through the glass strewn alley that went between the Bowling alley and Elsie's Tavern and led from the beach to my backyard.
I was not too late for supper.

See you next week, John. 

John Murray classes week of January 5, 2015

Thank you, my artists friends, for supporting my classes this Autumn term.
I hope you all have a fun and adventurous holiday season.
See you next year!
John and Sandy

John Murray classes week of December 8, 2014

Next week is the last week of the Fall term.
I enjoyed working with all the artists who attended my classes and saw some exceptional work created in the NAC studio.
Think of a work that treats the existential fears that at core created all human holidays.
The Winter Solstice, for instance that gave us many ancient and Christian beliefs about mortality and rebirth.
Hanukkah, the festival of light, where the menorah burned for 8 days with only enough oil for one day.
Fight the darkness, in spite of the fact that we all eventually go into it again.
As artists we have a connection to the primal that other non-artists haven't developed.
Tuesday's Plasticity and the Postmodern Figure class will have a female model, Thea, someone with whom I have not worked before.
Thank you for supporting my classes and being resilient and powerful artists.
See you next week, John.

John Murray classes week of December 1, 2014

What constitutes a painting?
Above is the light switch in the back room of the large studio at NAC, before it was painted this term.

Next is my dog scratching in front of a spray graffitti  piece in Medway MA.

Then a painting of a nude I did at my Montserrat College of Art Workshop a year ago.

What is your vision of "Painting"?

Next week there will be a model in both Supercharged class on Wednesday the 3rd.

See you next week, john.

John Murray classes week of November 24, 2014

Monday pm class, Postmodern Assemblage and Painting, will have a model next week.
Tuesday, Plasticity and the Postmodern Figure class will have 2 models, a male and a female, to work with.
There will be no classes on Wednesday the 26th, the day before Thanksgiving.
On that day commemorate the great Native People the European invaders destroyed.
See you next week John.