In a world where so much is demanding to be heard, Nina Murdoch commands our attention without ever raising her voice.
I fell in love with Nina Murdoch's work seven years ago. It was the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy and I was working for a BBC TBV show called Late Review. The producer had asked each member of the panel to choose two paintings to talk about on the show. I saw two paintings by Nina Murdoch and really couldn't look at anything else. 24 years old, and already Murdoch had a vision of her city, her world, her work. She made that Summer Exhibition her own. Love, as I say. And the real thing.
I can't remember what I said about Nina Murdoch on television. But I remember the paintings, because then as now, everything Murdoch paints is unforgettable. They were two of those Nina Murdoch city scenes, misty and dream-like, paintings that are full of a kind of urban romanticism, the work of someone who loves cities - and especially the city, especially London - a women who understands the city's glamour and mystery and possibilities. I couldn't take my eyes off those paintings.
What did I love so much? There was a stillness to them, a Sunday morning quality. They looked like Edward Hopper without the people. The clerks, the shop girls, the working men of Hopper had all gone home, leaving a scene that somehow made you happy and sad all at once, like a photograph of sometime in your life that will never come again. And they took my breath away. They take my breath away still.
I had never been to the RA's Summer Exhibition before and I couldn't believe how much there was a look at, how many demands on your attention. Art was stacked from ceiling to floor. But among those hundreds and thousands of pictures, Nina Murdoch caught my eye and wouldn't let it go. That's how I felt about Nina Murdoch then, and that's how I feel about her now. In a world where so much is demanding to be heard, Nina Murdoch commands our attention without ever raising her voice.
What is it about her work? The vision in those early paintings has matured, evolved, grown up. I can see that. But Nina Murdoch is still recognisably the same artist that she was back in the summer of 1994. She paints visions of the city. The hidden corners of the city, 'the city's ripped backside' as Iggy Pop had it, the part of the metropolis that we stare straight through.
The outskirts of railway station, the gaps between the office blocks, the blocks of flats. She teaches us to look again. She sees the beauty in it all, and looks at it with a kind of bruised romanticism. Nina Murdoch paints the way Sinatra sand, and Ali boxed, and Lauren Bacall smoked a cigarette. Even when she is looking at the bleakest urban landscape imaginable, there is always space for poetry, for lyricism, for grace.
There is nothing cold about these paintings. The light is constantly shifting in Murdoch's work, softening the hard edges of the capital. There is something incandescent about even the tangle of railway lines, the cheap housing, the canyons of office blocks. Her harsh city streets are often bathed in the gloaming of dawn or twilight. And although those streets are without people, they are not without humans it. How can that be? Because there is love in these pictures, and warmth, and that hard-boilded romance. There's an unconditional affection for her subject matter, and I find an echo of it in my own heart.
Both modern and timeless, Nina Murdoch's pictures are full of straight lines - the shaft of fading sunlight, the edge of a skyscraper, the hard glint of a railway line - and glazed with a kind of shining haze. Nina Murdoch's city is our city, recognisable and familiar, but glimpsed in a dream, or remembered far from home. Seven years on, and I am still in love with her work.
Other young British artists make more noise, grab more headlines, and throw their toys out of the pram. You can keep the lot of them. Nina Murdoch is creating a body of work that will endure long after the bratty stars of BritArt have sunk into bitter middle age. The city remains. And so will these glorious paintings.