<< Front page Arts March 12, 2004

Reknowned painter lectures on her artistic evolution

Elizabeth Murray: New York based artist describes the trajectory of her painting since the late 1960s.
 

Whether it is wrestling with the paint-brush or the pen most students at Oberlin, in their heart of hearts, long to live the life of a tortured, but successful artist. Last Monday renowned New York based painter Elizabeth Murray delivered a lecture about her life and work as an artist to a room filled with students. With a career that has spanned from the late 1960s to the present it is not a stretch to believe that Murray could offer valuable advise to struggling artists on campus. Hosted by the Art Department and the Ellen Johnson Visting Artist Fund, Murray gave students a chance to listen to her own interpretation of the creative process and what it means to be an artist in the 21st century. In addition to this, the crowd at Classroom II in the Art Building listened with interest to Murray’s explanation of her evolution as an artist and painter.

Murray has been described as a “pioneer in painting” with “her distinctively shaped canvases break[ing] with the art-historical tradition of illusionistic space in two dimensions.” Her work “playfully blurs the lines” of painting and concepts of space. In her smart gray blazer, her hair shaking wittily as she spoke, Murray was humorous and soft-spoken, but remarkably candid about the events in her life and her own reactions to her experimental artwork. She received a BFA in her native of Chicago and an MFA from Millis College. She playfully referred to the MFA as a “bogus degree” that allowed artists to believe that there was something they could do when they left school, namely teaching.

She attended the University of Chicago from 1958-1962. There she said that she received a very basic arts education, with instruction in color, drawing, art history and painting. It was there that she realized that she could paint. She described herself walking to her classes through the museum and observing the paintings with all their skill and artfulness. “It occurred to me [that] a real person [painted the works I saw] and I could do that too.” Thus she began her journey as a painter. She referred to her own work as being influenced by artists like Matisse and Gorky.

She mentioned that her early influences came from comic books. She enjoyed the movement in the paneling techniques used in comics. She also related her 1960’s fascination with the Pop-Art of Andy Warhol, Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns.

At this point, some of the students seemed to be getting restless after looking at slide after slide of Murray’s brilliant but very abstract work. She began to discuss the period when she believed that painting was dead and her consequent journey to challenge the idea that painting was stale and ineffective as an art-form. She wanted to do this through making the form new and innovative. She hoped to get involved with the process in painting and devise a way to see motion in her work. “I wanted to renew the genre,” said Murray. “I wanted to take oil painting and make it come alive in a difference kind of way.”

“There is something horrifying and really funny about my painting,” Murray stated as she looked at the screen and described how shapes in her work are violent and comical all at once. The slides of her work were often startling’ the canvases were sometimes torn apart or jagged and the colors and shapes fell and cut into each other. The boundaries are contested and unclear. Her subjects are mostly tables, shoes, cups and other articles used in daily life. But Murray reimagines them into gravity-defying space violators. Cups bend into each other; shoes look more like violins.

Murray is from a school of art that is experimental and not overtly political. It was often hard to find the emotion in work that wishes to reinterpret space and appears to be sweeping and floating against white art gallery walls. Her work is shown all over the United States and in Europe, but somehow the bright colors and innovative uses of the canvas were not enlivening and nor did they spur larger commentary. And maybe this is not the point. Although Murray spoke honestly, the lecture was not engaging because the personal events of her life seemed separate from what she explored in her painting. The audience never learned why she paints shoes or mugs or why she wishes to incorporate unity and disjunction in the process of creation. Her discussion of her use of oil paints and the physical dissection of the canvas was fascinating, but it did not seem to reflect any of her joy, pain, or hardships. Murray’s paintings seemed more like a tasks or math problems, rather than a thoughtful look into herself.


 
 
   

The Review News Service: News, weather, sports and more, in your ObieMail every Sunday and Wednesday night. (Click here to subscribe.)