John Murray classes week of March 9, 2015

Rest in Peace You Funny, Lovely Bastard.

I met Bill on a beautiful June day in 1967 and we have been friends, fellow artists, fighters and cohorts ever since.
I will miss him more than I can express.
See you next week, john.

John Murray classes first week of March 2015

I am on the brink of insanity with this weather.
I hope you're doing better than I am.
Next week try to paint a truly meaningless picture, some image with no value to yourself or anyone else.

Sometimes at my most desperate I do my best work,

as Samuel Beckett said, "I can't go on...I must go on..."

See you next week, John 

  

John Murray classes week of February 9, 2015

The snow piles up and over our plans.
Next week try a white on white painting.
Malevich, Rauschenberg, Ryman are a few who have denied traditional full-chroma art.
Underpaint and cover white, paint black and scrape to white, spray, wash, scrub...
This a hard winter, pile the paint thick, scrape it away and wash it out, pour it on, peel it back, smudge it, step on it...see you next week. I hope!
Love, john.

John Murray classes week of February 2, 2015

JOHN MURRAY - TALKING ABOUT MATISSE

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 5

7pm to 9pm

Admission fee: $20 

Please RSVP to Marte at marte@newartcenter.org

Refreshments and light dessert will be served

Matisse is old hat?
So let's move on and see where his awesome radical work has led in the hands of a new generation
Some have said that he was too decorative maybe some of his later work had a bit too much decorative gestalt but not the minimal unfinished pentimento pieces of the early teens
Minimal and incident laden at the same time questioning the history, presumptions and conceits of painting that work is as strong as always but where has rigorous painting gone? I mean I guess the raw and spacially open semi finished provisional work that Manet played with in 1875
Manet went to that glorious plane of questioning and breathless vertigo
And so did Matisse the new younger painters that I see now are too busy too full of guilt and afraid of failure.

See you next week, john.

John Murray classes week of January 26, 2015

What is a face?
Think about what we mean by likeness in graphic representation.
Whether in paint, paper, photography, what we think we see in a passing cloud, on a burnt piece of toast or bagel.The human visage is compelling to all members of our specie.
Think in terms of likeness, distortion, plasticity and ?.
People are strange as Jim Morrison said and our depiction of them (us) deserves to be at least fresh.
Try a piece that questions human likeness, yet demands recognition as a human image.
I once saw an image of an owl drawn with a stick in the muddy interior wall of a Mississippian culture mound. It was more "owl" than any other picture of an owl I have ever seen.
What an inspiration! With a stick in mud! 1,500 years ago! Or the hands of ancient hunters in caves, made with fat and pigment, far more alive than the academic museum portraits of dead European noblility.
See you next week, John

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