Summer Session John Murray Classes week of August 4,2014

August heat and light.

What can you make of it?
When the dog days start can you use the intensity to push your painting?
Late afternoon in the New Art Center can be very hot, but as the sun begins to set and dusk
melts into night the mystery of the summer has its effect.
I love the summer session in the big studio and find it a great creative opportunity.
Next week try and show the face of deep summer.
Before we know what has happened we'll be freezing again.
Enjoy!
See you next week, John.

Summer session John Murray classes week of July 28, 2014

                                                                                 Herring Cove Beach-John Murray

I enjoyed working with the model last week, I hope you did.
This week think about figure/ground issues and deal with placing a figure in a sketchy background.
A background that implies a number of possibilities.
The painting that engages me most is painting that opens possibilities about form/content and plasticity.
Or try a painting with no spacial illusion and do a flat frontal painting that acknowledges the literal flatness of the canvas.
The critic Clement Greenberg espoused this view and that concept contributed to Jackson Pollack's painting and fame.

Barcelona (for Aaron Siskind)-John Murray

See you next week, John. 

summer session John Murray classes week of July 21, 2014

Next week we will have a model in both classes (Monday and Wednesday).

Please bring paper and canvas enough to explore the poses and deconstruct/stylize from them.
The model will be a male nude, Kim, with whom I've worked before.
The painting below is the result:

see you next week, John.

Summer session John Murray classes week of July 14, 2014

Where does our painting come from?

                                "Day at the Beach" oil on canvas- john murray


Art is a complex business once you leave the still life setup.
Is it an emotional response to joy or tragedy?
Is it a response to phenomena: a brilliant sunset?
The deep blue mystery of night broken by shafts and bursts of yellow light?
Is it a poem or a broken bone bleached by the sun lying in desert light?

It is an ephemeral notion made solid by the artist. 
Whether ironic, sardonic or a sincere response to the hopelessness/joy of life.
Whatever you find or feel, the plasticity of your material in process and gesture
is the delivery system.
As Philip Guston said about painting:
 "when things go well I leave the room".

See you next week, john

Summer session John Murray classes week of July 7, 2014

Happy July!

Those who worked from my still life did some interesting work, for those who didn't I will set it up so that you may consider it again.

The summer makes me want to paint abstractly.

The figurative world seems too hard-edged and the generosity of abstraction beckons to to my mind and senses.

Above is a new painting that was based on seeing limestone posts in the Great Plains.

These were carved from quarried limestone by the early settlers and used as fence posts in an area with few trees.

I remember the great rolling grasses and white/blue immense sky under the blazing sun that reflected from these iconic ancient monuments to the unstoppable flood of white settlers as they erected fences and destroyed  the bison and the Indian cultures of the Plains.

Life goes on, and the free-flowing Indian horsemen have been replaced by small dying towns and farms. 

The title of the painting is: "The Poetry of Limestone Posts". It is 30 x 30" oil on canvas.

Start with your own experience and paint an abstraction next week.

see you then, John. 

Summer session John Murray classes week of June 30, 2014

Next week I will set up a still life for you to work from.

The Whitney has a Jeff Koons Retrospective: big, shiny, sexy, vulgar, commercial, Postmodern
collectibles for the very rich and ambitious.
Has our life within the grid become so desperate and mindless that this work has come to reflect our retinal
cognition?
Yes, I'm afraid so.
Given that depressing and existential reality, and the realization that humanity is an infestation on a fertile rock in space, I must say that I enjoy this stuff in a perverse way.
How can one be moralistic at a moment like late June 2014.
Suck it up and enjoy the bullshit and flash of Jeff and his big-money kitsch!



As my favorite reviewer/critic, Roberta Smith says;
"The erotic and, to some extent, the scatological are never far beneath the surface in Mr. Koons’s art. Exhibit A is “Play-Doh,” a new, almost certain masterpiece whose sculptural enlargement of a rainbow pile of radiant chunks captures exactly the matte textures of the real thing, but also evokes paint, dessert and psychedelic poop."
Aah Jeff, we hardly knew ye.
See you next week, John.

Summer session John Murray classes week of June 23, 2014

Summer Solstice is here! 

Next week try expressing the pleasures and heat of Summer.
Matisse was magnificent with his Moroccan and Southern France paintings, as well of course,
as his Oceanic paper cutouts.
To my mind the best work that somehow expresses Summer and the mystery of it all is Picasso's
"Night Fishing at Antibes"

See you next week, John.