Stuart Murphy Exhibition. York St John University. 19th February 2009

The line sets forth and wanders like a fox hunting. A bolt falls here like a birdfoot. This is like a man’s steady striding round the familiar paths of his own garden and this like the dragged belly of something wounded. The blood drops follow each other, hedgerow to hedgerow. The mind follows that track. So many marks, so many footprints in the field of snow.

Looking at Drawing Edward Lucie Smith (Born 1933)



Head is what I first encounter. Head, 121cm x 44cm oil on canvas painting stares, not at the viewer but past. Not a challenging, enquiring stare but one that could begs loneliness. What also catches my eye is the scratched into surface down the right hand side of the painting. The paint applied almost as cement would be applied to a surface, then the incisions that are scrawled into it: scratched, cut, carved. One feels the bodily presence of the artist through the materials, the materials that form an almost disfigured face; the left hand side disappearing into a haze of colour. On a wall down my right hand side are two works, Pain and Warheads. Pain is the first encounter of the two. A 169cm x 152cm ink and oil bar on paper. Making me slightly uncomfortable, the work is made up of heads. Heads screaming in fury but emit no sound. I don’t feel their pain only the discomfort produced. Screaming into silence is again what makes these faces seem so lonely. Again. The eyes stare but wait. Parts of the seemingly random composition frozen like film still. And again like in Head and Warheads there is a presence of the artist’s body, through the material and a physical handlability of the materials. Pain makes no incision into the materials used but this time it’s the material that is used to generate an illusion of incision. Warheads, which is on the same wall as Pain, is a 230cm x 152cm drawing made up of graphite, charcoal, ink, acrylic paint and biro on paper. The heads re-appear but this time they become almost a burden to themselves. Piles of rock like heads line the base of the paper, weighed down with variants of the same form piled on top. Some scream, some stare. But what strikes me about this work are the footprints on the very bottom of the paper, appearing to be underneath the heads. The presence of the artist is still evident in the materials in this work but his actual trace of walking up and down the art work and his decision to keep it as part of the art work really catches me. One can then presume that the work was done on the floor. The artist walking and running the ink is all I can see. The ink acts like the dragged belly of something wounded, the bleeding lines act almost as contours, and the mind follows those tracks.

Turning to my left, into the second cube along I sit on the floor. I sit opposite Faces, a 236cm x 34cm drawing made up of black marker pen on paper. In this one it’s the eyes. The obsessive, compulsive eye. In this work the materiality take no prominence. Thecontent sees to this. Here we are no more dealing with body in relation to material and action but an obsession with imaging or obsession with process, the repetitive action that comes from being absorbed in what one is making. It becomes almost abstract that process of making, it transcends representation and it becomes just artist and material. I can try and interpret that to an infinite extent but do we will never know no matter how advanced technology gets, the physicality of making the work. The amount of pressure applied with each line, the exact positioning of the body, the thought process and emotions of the artist at that moment in time. But of course, we can try.
Term coined by Martin Heidegger. He suggests that the private relationships that we have with the world are those things that we deal with, noting that the kind of dealings which are closest to us do not bare perceptual cognition but a kind of concern which manipulates things and puts them to use.