2009
The linear creation narrative of a painting is read in its final composition. Unlike other mediums read along a narrative, the viewer looks down the narrative, into a painting. The narrative's representation is foreshortened and flattened into the single image seen hanging on the wall. The narrative is seen simultaneously through its redeemed end. Underwritten from the start, this non-phenomenal, redemptive end clouds the viewer's eyes with the reverant and glittering prizes of the painting’s post-death space.
My paintings, completed over the course of months, are thick with acrylic paint, insulating spray foam, glitter, glazes and collaged sections of paint, extending in places out from the board 3 to 4 inches.
I pour directly on the painting, and on glass, to be peeled off once dry. Sometimes applied flat as collage, other times as a sausage maker or Montgolfier, tacking down the edges, and filling the insides with foam.
I cut back in, remove sections, re-apply. I collage my own marks.
These actions all confuse. They all order. The result, a constructed and Frankenstein narrative specific and relevant to only the final composition, the one that does not preclude all but me, of the painting it is contained within, rendered in a manner similar to that which painters have always used to summon illusionistic form from flatness.
My thoughts about painting are framed by the medium’s relationship to others, specifically it’s relationship to literature and music.
Influenced by authors Djuna Barnes, John Hawkes and Flannery O’Connor, I am interested how personal pronoun use, point of view and narrative play in a work can, without self-conscious or purposeful obfuscation, solicit and order the chaos of quotidian horror, confusion, and terror in a form more permanent than its maker. The horror of hope in horrible futures, un-foretold and without contingency. The confusion of imperceptible human weakness, loudly indicated by the weak. The terror of the inevitable, inconsistent slip of the present into an inaccessible past.
I’ve often found my colleagues among musicians, and rarely among painters. My history as a musician and as someone surrounded by musicians extends much further into the past than my history as a painter. As it was music I was first in love with as a teenager, any other medium I pursue after it will suffer a comparison. There are parallels in the creation of a painting to the recording of a multitude of performances to create the illusion of a single one. I find parallel concerns in a genre like garage rock to painting, especially with regard to some phoenix like death and rebirth cycle. It is from music that I think about painting and it is in conversations with musicians that I feel most like a painter.
My fascination with music is not as academic as with literature. It is romantic. I am haunted by the loud performance of the stage or the dancefloor while I privately perform in the studio. I will always prefer to dress extravagantly and do my hair to drink whisky and move in a loud, dark bar than to sit quietly in the bright and silent gallery. Music, and the culture surrounding it has produced my most searing memories, and these are as close to me as any brush or bucket in the studio.
While translation between mediums remains impossible and seductive, I track and coordinate and lose and regain the moving points in painting that, while named differently and of very different dimensions, correspond to that which is not dream, but is dream-like. |
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Wil Murray |
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