John Murray classes week of August 24, 2015

Another Summer comes to an end.
The beauty and endless pulse of Summer has run its course for my Supercharged class at NAC.
I love the hot late afternoons and gradually darkening early evenings in the big studio.
Next week both sessions (Monday and Wednesday) will have a model. A female nude.
Thank you for attending this Summer term.
See you next week.
John.

john Murray classes week of August 17, 2015

Night fishing at Antibes
 

Hot Summer morning relieved by aloft slightly whispers of past breezes Long evaporated in whatever there is or is not...

-John Murray

Make art!

John Murray classes week of August 10, 2015

In keeping with last week's assignment let's stay with a theme: Rauschenbergian playfulness!
Find a few pieces of scrap metal and use them in some manner to initiate a painting.
Trace them over and over attach them to your canvas or surface write about them and their history or origin across your surface and then paint as a counterpoint to the narrative.
Search the roadways of America and gather the fruits of our insane destructive energy and industry.
See you next week, john

John Murray classes week of August 3, 2015

Next week let's get personal...
Robert Rauschenberg got very personal with Amerikan Kulture in the 1960's.
His "Combine" paintings took our national obsessions, loves, hates, fears, desires and prejudices from the media and transferred them onto canvas, he then painted around and into them with a pastiche of Abstract Expressionist gestural punctuation and irony.
For you the assignment (if you choose to accept it) is to bring to class images (preferably photo copies) of what you love, hate, fear, despise, admire and find weird.
I will show you how to transfer these images to canvas and then counterpoint them with paint and ironic plasticity.
The top painting is mine and includes such personal icons as my much admired and loved Yamaha Z1 liter class motorcycle, a Picasso woodcut and a "t" square...Rauschenberg's is self explainatory.
Rauschenberg  used Xylene, a very toxic industrial cleaning fluid, to transfer his images,,,I will show you how to transfer safely with acrylic medium.
See you next week, john

John Murray classes week of July 27, 2015

Cool Summer abstraction!

Dig the work of Robert Ryman, a great influence on my early work in California.

Cool, detached, cerebral and gorgeous painting , it goes across my eyes and mind like a cool oceanic breeze on an exquisite coast of the imagination: no death, no war, no politics, just the infinite space and pulse of 

ephemeral existence...a life we can only dream of.

Try your hand at this concept next week... 

see you then, love. john.

John Murray classes week of July 20, 2015

Mid-July!

Celebrate with a portrait of Julius Caesar, for whom the month was named by the Roman Senate.
The warmest month in the Northern  Hemisphere, the coldest in the Southern.
Rejoice in the hot sun and ancient lineage of this truly majestic month by attempting a deconstructed vision of this noble warrior and civic leader.
Don't forget under-painting and drawing with charcoal and pencil, then layering and viscosity exploitation overall.
See you next week
john.

john Murray classes week of July 13, 2015

Next week work a painting from an image like this one.
A cold sea and beach on the Maine coast.
Isolated and grey.
Deconstruct the content of such an image and bring your paint and drawing forward until the piney salt
grainy cold idea becomes a unique work of art.
see you next week john.