Idris Murphy

Every issue, A Public of Individuals will send a sheet of questions to an artist and publish the answers. This issue's artist is Idris Murphy, a landscape painter who has said that through his work he would like "to encounter, not just to observe" the landscape. Murphy (or Idris, as he prefers to sign his work) lives in Sydney, where he was born in 1949. He is represented by King Street Gallery on Burton, and is one of five featured artists in Two Thirds Sky, artists in desert country, a documentary which will be screened on SBS TV in August.

Why do you make art?
My first response to this written question is to say that it is not an easy question, and in a slightly belligerent way I should answer 'I don't know, I just do!', although maybe that is too easy. On reflection, I am at once flattered that I seem to be the first to be asked to respond to these questions in A Public of Individuals, and at the same time apprehensive that what one says is often misconstrued (a.k.a. making a fool of oneself).
However, in the spirit of the project I will give it a go.
It seems to me that art needs no justification; it is what people have done for thousands of years.
Personally, it may be that it was the only thing that I was any good at.
Why do I continue to make art? Because it sustains me, and in the definition of sustainable as 'exploiting natural resources without destroying the natural ecological balance of an area', this may be a useful definition.
The process of and in making, allows insight into the creative process and hence what it is to be human. An insight into myself and the view I hold of the world, without destroying either. Art persuades me to rethink these views and continually re-assess reality.

What attracted you to landscape painting?
Is this the same question as 'what attracted me to painting the landscape?' Chicken and egg? Is the question to answer first, 'what attracted me to the landscape?'
My early memories of the bush, to use the vernacular.
My father was a forest officer when he was young and his attachment to the land rubbed off on me. Along with my holidays spent fishing up and down the coast, and a particular set of feelings for the landscape on and around my aunt's farm at Wyong, NSW, this would appear to guarantee the importance of the first question.
What attracted me to landscape painting?
Other landscape paintings, i.e. art.
Arriving back in Australia in 1981 after nearly four years' study, mostly in Britain and France, the question many young artists seemed to be asking was 'what should I paint?' This seemed pertinent as the European interiors that I had produced seemed out of place. I had not considered the possibility that the Australian landscape painters had anything to offer in the way of serious art and, indeed, on my return to Sydney it seemed that no other young artists had any intention of taking on this politically incorrect subject. But having fallen in love with images painted about the landscape, from Cezanne to Rembrandt, Bomberg to Morandi to mention just a few, I started to look for those artists in the Australian landscape tradition who had some similar substance, artistic intelligence and formal structure to what I had found in Europe.
A small Fred Williams, a work on paper of a fallen tree with obvious cubist influence and a Cezanne-like formal structure (not unlike some Morandi works), exhibited at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, set up the first possible serious response to the Australian landscape as a motif. Another way in to the defining of this non-European landscape that I was just starting to recognise.

Do you paint particular places?
I do not believe I set out to paint particular places. In fact, that raises further questions of what does 'particular place' mean for the paintings that I am now making? Taken at face value, the answer might be that there are places that I am drawn to in the northwest of New South Wales. These have an effect on me which makes me want to continually go back, somewhat like going back to visit great paintings.

Could you name some of these places?
Menindee Lakes, Mutawinji and others.

What draws you to these places?
In an answer to a similar question, which I have been considering for the catalogue to the SBS documentary Two Thirds Sky, I wrote the following:
The first word that comes to mind would be solitude. However, it is more complex than that and it may be that it is a 'sense of solitude' or the 'scent of solitude'. 'Tas' Drysdale talked about the freedom of the outback, which I agree is an important element, but I hasten to say that it is not about running away from anything. Solitude. A sense of being without interruption, maybe better stated as interrupted by being.
Beauty, the scent of the place, the colour, all of these come readily to mind and remind me of John Berger's The White Bird, of which I am a fan. "If the Creation was purposeful, its purpose is a hidden one which can only be discovered intangibly within signs, never by the evidence of what happens. It is within this bleak natural context that beauty is encountered and the encounter is by its nature sudden and unpredictable." The desert for me is such a place. However, in the end it is from the works themselves that my reasons may be best known.

Do you think your relationship to the landscape - your use of it as a basis for art - differs from that of past artists?
I must say that again this will, over time, be evident in the work. I will say, however, that at this time the coming into being of indigenous works on paper and canvas, and the contradistinction this has set up for my work, is producing something which is a new mixture (if I were an art historian I might give this a title). It may be analogous to the early modernist movement, or as I would rather like to think, analogous to the beginnings of Jazz in the USA.

Of peoples' responses to your work, which have you found most satisfying?
What comes immediately to mind is the response that I have received from young painters, who in some cases have borrowed money to buy one of my paintings. This amazed me, and it has been very encouraging, especially early on when I felt that I was making little progress.

http://www.art.cofa.unsw.edu.au/staff/staff_names/murphy/murphy.html

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