Introduction: The Context
‘The food of the soul is Light and Space.’ Herman Melville
As others have pointed out, the art historian and philosopher Herbert Read among them, the greatest art reconciles the contradictions between the senses and the imagination, or effectively between realism and romanticism. In our age, we need both qualities to nuance and inflect our art — subjective sources and objective means — just as Nina Murdoch works with space as well as surface, with dematerialisation as well as with observed fact. Art for her is a philosophical enquiry as well as a complex procedure of paint application, decision-making and interior debate. Her paintings, full of the scatter and broadcast of light, are evocations of place as well as landscapes of the mind. She celebrates the incandescent flux of life, felt as much as seen, experienced with proper wonderment and awe.
I have been following the developments in Murdoch’s work very closely over the last decade, as she has become increasingly experimental and technically proficient, and equally ambitious and sure of her subject. She chose a difficult and unfashionable medium in which to work: egg tempera on gesso panel, traditional materials used by Egyptian and Byzantine artists, and by the masters of the early Italian Renaissance, who set a high standard to aspire to. But Murdoch finds that tempera offers her a flexibility and physical presence which is entirely suited to her temperament.
It has taken Murdoch 20 years to develop her highly individual tempera technique to the peak at which she now operates. Her method is one in which putting on paint balances paint removal, as colour is layered on to wood panels (each carefully prepared with six layers of gesso), then washed away again or sanded back with fine sandpaper. It is a very liquid approach, the paint encouraged to pool, with plenty of water to vary the densities. Layers of colour are differentiated by glazing medium, then overpainted. ‘I like how the layers are separated — you can keep the colours really clear,’ she says.
Much of her subsequent process involves searching back through the layers for colour combinations that have gone before, to see how they might work with the new top surface. She always keeps closely in touch with the white gesso ground, as her main source of light. (This is akin to watercolour painters using the white of the paper.) There may be as many as 40 layers of tempera on one board, but the finished picture will not display signs of the paint archaeology that has gone into its creation. The final image is exquisitely resolved yet varied in its unity.
Her earliest work was first figure-based, then figures in landscape. There was a brief period in which she depicted herself and her family in psychological, emotionally charged paintings, but realised that there were subtler ways of showing emotion. But it is to the subject of the city that she has returned with the greatest regularity. As a student she had an epiphany on a bus travelling to the Slade while looking out over the railway tracks at Euston. From then on she painted big cityscapes with people in them, though the figures became increasingly ghostlike and finally disappeared as she relinquished obvious narrative. Born in King’s Cross, she chose the area as the subject of her postgraduate thesis at the Royal Academy. ‘Somehow, I think I put all my feelings into spaces’, she says.
She dates her real work, in other words the paintings that begin to express her individual and very particular take on the world, to 1995. She held her first solo exhibition in 1997, at the Portland Gallery, then moved to the Blue Gallery (solo shows in 2000 and 2001-2), before mounting a brace of exhibitions with the Fine Art Society in 2007 and 2009. She found a happier berth at Marlborough Fine Art, which was when I discovered her work and wrote catalogue essays for a trio of exhibitions: Shedding Light (2011), Enlightenment (2014) and Collecting Colour (2018).
During that time I have come to know Murdoch’s work well, and to admire and appreciate it in equal measure. Inevitably, in the course of our discussions, I asked her about her earlier life and art school years, partly because Euan Uglow (1932-2000), one of her most formative teachers, had also been a friend of mine. She was certainly part of a very talented intake of young painters. Among her more successful fellow-students and friends at the Slade were Cecily Brown, Justin Mortimer and Dryden Goodwin, along with Stuart Pearson Wright a Slade alumnus of a slightly later generation.
She painted in watercolour right through her childhood until she went to art school. But it wasn’t considered a serious medium at the Slade, being associated too closely with amateur artists, and she stopped using it. ‘But I always found it very exciting because if it goes wrong, it’s really wrong’, she says. She began to paint in oils but didn’t take naturally to the medium and used it in thin fluid washes and glazes, almost as if it was watercolour or tempera. She felt that it was too easy to invent techniques in oil paint, to apply paint successively to ‘make a picture’. Ultimately, she felt too self-conscious working in oils.
Murdoch has said how tough she found it adapting to the Slade, but that working in the Life Room with Uglow gave her a much-needed structure. ‘He taught me about colour and light, how they react to each other, how a colour changes because of the colour next to it. He taught me about visual experience. It wasn’t really about drawing the figure, but about the figure and the wall: how light hits the figure, and the colour behind. Bernard Cohen was equally important. He told me to get out of the Life Room. Euan taught me how to look, Bernard taught me to sometimes not finish things, to leave them and move on.’ Unlike Uglow, Murdoch does not paint by monocular measurement, but rather from a mixture of observation, memory and imagination, using washy, often transparent paint to achieve flowing forms.
She was not happy at the Slade, and by the end of the second year had virtually resolved to leave. But she persisted, and found her path by painting buildings. (Her Slade paintings of figures have been largely destroyed.) At the Royal Academy Schools, she taught herself how to use egg tempera, after a visiting tutor rightly observed that she painted in oil like a tempera artist. She found it a very difficult medium to use, but its very intractability became an obsession with her and eventually she devised a process of applying it with glazing medium that suited her. ‘It was literal trial and error to work out how to get what I wanted,’ she says. ‘It’s always been that really. I find that quite exciting, using the material to help you think differently.’ She tended to do much of her best work in the garage at home or in her grandmother’s chicken shed. Clearly she worked better when no one was around to distract or offer their opinion. She preferred to work on her own, good training for the solitary life of the artist.
When she began to exhibit her work professionally, her subject was inhabited cityscapes empty of people, the buildings more like sculptures or carved blocks than houses, perhaps arranged around a light-well or on either side of a wide expanse of rail tracks, or opening out onto a piazza or a multi-lane highway. There were aerial views of high-rise blocks in big cities, and the low-level vantage of underpasses or beneath bridges. Occasionally, the structures would be identified, or a view was pinned to its point of survey. (One pair of paintings, of the Lloyds Building, was commissioned by Robert Hiscox and is now part of the Hiscox Collection. It was included in the exhibition 50 Years of Art: The Hiscox Collection 1970-2020, held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery.) By 2007, her paintings were less cityscapes than details of the fall of light across walls and floors, some still with a longer vista of surrounding architecture: exits and entranceways, arches to the wider world. But increasingly her preoccupation was zeroing in on the elemental interaction of light and space, no longer buildings as such, but places.
The Exhibitions: A Brief Commentary
‘Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings.’Agnes Martin
In 2001, the broadcaster and author Tony Parsons wrote the first catalogue introduction for a Murdoch exhibition: her show at the Blue Gallery. He had fallen in love with her work at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1994, and in that huge bazaar of a show had had eyes for nothing else. ‘That’s how I felt about Nina Murdoch then, and that’s how I feel about her now,’ he stated. ‘In a world where so much is demanding to be heard, Nina Murdoch commands our attention without ever raising her voice.’ Striving to analyse what it was about her work that captivated him he wrote: ‘She teaches us to look again. She sees the beauty in it all [the modern city], and looks at it with a kind of bruised romanticism. Nina Murdoch paints the way Sinatra sang, 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.’
Tony Parsons’ encomium was a hard act to follow. Richard Cork wrote the preface to Concrete Fields, the catalogue to Murdoch’s first solo exhibition with the Fine Art Society in 2007. He concluded his piece as follows: ‘A nightmarish alienation coexists with a seductive apprehension of light. At once menacing and luminous, Murdoch’s art reflects the ambivalence running through our response to the lonely allure of urban existence.’
Matthew Collings contributed a text entitled Breakthrough: Nina Murdoch’s new paintings, to the brochure for her second FAS show, in 2009, called In the Dark. The exhibition title refers to Murdoch’s habit of trying to surprise herself through her practice, not being too aware of what she is doing — almost working in the dark. Collings wrote: ‘Her paintings have changed recently, become more subtle, so you feel the emotion is more in the painting than the picture, how it’s done rather than what it is — the movement of the paint, the play of colours and light — the sense of something real and concrete but at the same time constantly melting and reforming.’
Then, in 2011, for Murdoch’s first solo exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery, I wrote: ‘Her paintings were never especially descriptive of place, more evocative of mood, and now they are increasingly about emotional states.’ But the artist’s response cannot be released without a specific location to trigger it, so, paradoxically, the places where her epiphanies (or moments of literal revelation) occur, remained — and remain — crucial to the process. I also noted then that: ‘Her paintings are not idealised or frozen moments, they are living statements — bulletins from the front-line of urban existence.’
I summed up in 2011: ‘There’s a sense of history to her images, of the land before the streets, of the farms that once were there, and before that the bare earth and the molten rock. There’s also a twofold urgency: a sense of immanence — of a spiritual force pervading the universe — and a sense of imminence, of something about to happen. She wants to create, through her chasing of the change in light and the look of form, a self-contained entity that is “living and glowing and breathing”.’
For her 2014 Marlborough exhibition, Enlightenment, I tried to make an equivalent in words of her extraordinary images: ‘Blakean outpourings of dazzling light rendered in colour that is subtle but also explosive, with a burnished patina of marks and sheens, characterize Nina Murdoch’s latest paintings.’ One of the more seductive potentials of paint is the ability to capture the flux of life in a static image, and this has long been her intention. And I identified her latest work as ‘a kind of urban baroque: opulent, fizzing with contained movement, extra-ordinary. In her luscious surfaces the colour is foaming, falling, fulminating, trapping the numinous.’
Overt narrative or the inclusion of figures would disturb or interrupt the paintings, and undermine the focused investigation of light and space that Murdoch requires. Her places are half-remembered, half-imagined, structures of light. But the connection between painting and real places remains absolute and intimate, whether a bunker in Devon, or a car park in France. ‘I do everything by how it feels, not how it should be,’ she said. ‘I dream my pictures.’ I commented: ‘She paints exceptional moments of light, but also moments of vision, when appearances are transfigured by the play of light into something beyond the ordinary.’
In the catalogue essay for Collecting Colour (2018), Murdoch’s third solo exhibition with Marlborough Fine Art, I recounted the crisis that had suddenly hit Murdoch’s art after 2014: her paint suppliers stopped making the glazing medium she had hitherto worked with. A crisis can often throw up unexpected solutions and, in some ways, be a powerful force for beneficial change. In this instance, while she was waiting for another supply to be sourced, Murdoch began to experiment with other media. She prepared a number of smaller wooden panels with gesso on both sides, and on these she began to paint and draw in watercolour, with dry pastel worked over the top.
This effectively revolutionised her painting process. Instead of a large panel taking a year, or even three years, to complete, with months of laborious layering and sanding back, of trial and error on a grand scale, Murdoch was able to experiment with her ideas more freely and much more quickly in watercolour and pastel. Mixing marble dust with the gesso, she gave a key to her surfaces so that the dry pastel would have something to grip.
In that 2018 essay I wrote: ‘She reacts against the self-denying, puritanical side of the English, which convinces artists that they must get rid of the best bit of a painting because it throws the rest out. Her philosophy is to keep the best bit in and make it more so — in fact, to make her paintings a unified collection of best bits.’ This intense concentration of energy, this denial of sacrifice, is a potent celebration of subject, even if the subject as such is something as nebulous as light or colour or space. ‘In her progress towards abstraction, Murdoch is perfecting a notation of the world as shifting, luminous, ultimately unreliable. Her art encompasses the sudden shining forth of some aspect of truth or reality gathered from observation, invariably of the commonest events or objects, such as light-fall in the corner of a supermarket car park. Such revelation requires a fresh painterly language, new and startling. Murdoch’s rich melodies aspire to this.’
And again: ‘She celebrates the observing sensibility operating in the continuum of life, actively engaging the whole sensory apparatus in a slow-burn response which builds in the opposite way to the instant hit pattern of much contemporary culture.’
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Titling the Work
Titles have always been a problem for Murdoch, as they are for many artists. Only two of the twenty-three items in her 2001 Blue Gallery exhibition were titled, the rest were unidentified except by their catalogue numbers. Ideally her paintings would not be burdened with words, but numbers don’t work for her either, so she is forced to rely on some other stratagem. In the 2007 Concrete Fields exhibition, she borrowed place-names from ancient maps of the locale she was painting. These titles included Church Crow Feet, Popes Pond Shot and Mrs Lambourne’s Flora Tea Gardens. Here is the poetry of place but without a specific contemporary reference; the names are sufficiently detached.
This pattern of titling continued through the first two Marlborough exhibitions, but had changed by the third, as Murdoch grew increasingly uncomfortable with the specific references of the map names. Her husband, Dan, listens to a lot of film music and she decided to borrow titles from that source. Thus we now have paintings called Watch Chimes and Il Tramonto, both from Ennio Moricone, In the Upper Room from Philip Glass, and Best of Both Worlds and Montague Terrace (In Blue) from Scott Walker. This seems a suitable quarry for names which don’t carry much baggage with them, or at least not the kind of references which might qualify or interfere with the viewer’s response to Murdoch’s paintings.
A Londoner by circumstance and choice, for a long time she painted only the city, and in particular the area of Battersea on her doorstep. She is thoroughly steeped in the urban environment, and admits to dreaming about cities, as did her mother and grandmother: of houses and the spaces in between, ‘the city as a framework’. For years she has painted the physical fabric of the city, though now she is extending her territory to buildings in the countryside, from Hampshire to Scotland. She is hardwired to the built environment, with her grandparents and uncles all pursuing the vocation of architect. She herself is not a descriptive realist nor a topographical painter, but rather a painter of space and place. She is especially inspired by the transitional states of consciousness between sleeping and waking (technically known as hypnopompia and hypnagogia), when images appear freely in the mind.
New Work
‘These are no longer pictures, but aggregations of colours (polychromies), quarries of precious stone, painting in the most beautiful sense of the word.’ Signac, after looking at late Turner.
The Hem, the first of this new body of Murdoch’s work, took the area around Borough Market and London Bridge as its source. Actually, the painting was re-worked, and appeared over an earlier one which had been too figurative, its horizontal divisions too schematic. This new image of distilled winter light was painted in traditional perspective. Murdoch had yet to free her space more thoroughly, although it should be reiterated that her subjects are still all real experiences: ‘I couldn’t do a made-up thing,’ she insists.
But her attitude has changed. ‘I don’t look for stuff anymore, it’s more a diary of my life — I happen to be going past something.’ (This chimes with something Joan Mitchell, a recent enthusiasm of Murdoch’s, said: ‘Travelling around is a way of finding things which actually find me.’) Thus waiting on a railway platform in Bournemouth was the source for two new paintings, Phantom Thread I & II. Murdoch took photos of a beautiful wall covered in moss in almost no light. A wall in Battersea and another in Brockley similarly prompted paintings, Catch Hold and House of Woodcock respectively, while on a different occasion, driving to the New Forest, she was stuck in a traffic jam and took some photos which later became watercolours. (These eventually developed into Morning Passages and Pink Moon.) However, she does not find photographs particularly useful, and prefers to rely on her memory. ‘I am trying to paint something that happens in the briefest second and then vanishes. If you photograph it, you kill all the colours and the light and dark are too extreme.’
Now she wants her imagery to be more floating in space. She doesn’t actually need the horizontal and vertical axes found in her earlier paintings, the stage set or indications of the built environment. As her search has moved inward, the focus has deepened and her paintings have become more about trapping time and light while wanting to keep a sense of movement as part of the pictorial equation. Her paintings now are more like a conversation between colours and textures, with layers of dialogue. Although their origins are still very much in a particular place, these paintings are also a kind of self-portrait. ‘I’m trying to build emotion more into the paintings’, she says. ‘They’re as near to me as anything I’ve done.’
Art is about transformation — or the vision to perceive change and equivalence. Things turn into other things, as the human mind and imagination dwell upon them, just as Leonardo remarked centuries ago after looking at the stains on a wall. Murdoch might look at the cracks and whorls and burrs in a wooden floor and daydream into the patterns she sees. Equally, she will daydream about a wall. That fluidity of space and imagery is what she aims for in her paintings. Just as certain colours indicate or reflect states of mind, so she uses specific places to enact the need or desire to paint certain colours.
Her process is more open and evident in these new works, less covered up. You can, in a sense, see the workings. It is always revealing to consider the artists Murdoch is looking at, and the late works of both Turner and Rothko have been much in her mind in recent months. She particularly loves the simplicity and pared down quality of Turner’s watercolours and late oils, and is much drawn to the fusion of the elements in his late work: fire, water, air and earth. As Inés Richter-Musso has written: ‘In the beginning, he [Turner] was interested in their appearance, later he directed his attention to their dynamic characteristics: variability, movement, dissolution and fusion.’ And she writes further that what distinguishes Turner’s late work is ‘a mixture of factual depiction of places and creative freedom.’
It is that creative freedom that appeals to Murdoch, the ability to approach and even embrace abstraction without denying the world which remains the true source of the imagery. At this juncture, one recalls Rothko’s assertion: ‘I’m not an abstractionist. I’m not interested in relationships of color or forms or anything else.’ Indeed he always insisted that he was only concerned to express extreme or basic human emotions, such as tragedy and ecstasy. John Elderfield has written: ‘His pictures are designed to deliver transcendence, to provide access to hidden but immanent truths of the universe … actually to convey them.’ And remember that aesthetic moments can be troubling as well as beautiful. Again Rothko is illuminating here: ‘Often, towards nightfall, there’s a feeling in the air of mystery, threat, frustration — all of these at once. I would like my paintings to have the quality of such moments.’
Since for her abstraction is an ally not a goal, Murdoch finds herself deeply appreciative of painters who move in the hinterland of abstraction such as Rothko. Another American painter, Joan Mitchell (1925-92), is a new and potent inspiration for her. Mitchell, whose work owed much to memories of landscape, irradiated her work with extraordinary colour. When asked what her colours meant, Mitchell replied they didn’t mean anything, they simply existed, rather as letters in the alphabet exist. This is a response Murdoch would appreciate. If the rage and violence that characterise Mitchell’s approach are foreign to Murdoch’s temperament, the compensating lyricism is common to both artists. To Murdoch, Mitchell’s work ‘makes complete sense’. Among the images pinned up on her studio wall are extraordinary close-ups of late Turner paintings and Joan Mitchell abstracts.
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Working with the Paint
Lockdown enabled Nina Murdoch to take her time and simply concentrate on painting — no one to please, no deadlines. As a consequence she worked on The Hem, which she calls the mother of the group, for about six months. What a luxury that was, but how it has paid off! This was to be the lead work in a project suggested by a commercial gallery to produce six or eight paintings for an exhibition in Europe, which galvanised her into embarking optimistically on a whole series of new large panels.
It’s difficult to paint light without becoming embroiled in some sort of technicolored extravaganza, but Murdoch doesn’t want the whole painting to be vibrant; she relishes too the more muted colour areas. ‘I’m much more controlled in the way I’m painting now,’ she says. Her experiments, with small hand-size gesso panels and slightly larger boards, enable her to have a better idea of how she wants to proceed in the full-scale paintings. But equally she doesn’t want to feel that she has worked out a painting beforehand, so her aim is to ‘allow it all to unravel a bit’. She wants the image to develop freely, though perhaps within the framework of her previous experimentation. The idea is to see how far she can ‘unravel’ a subject and its depiction while keeping the sense of the painting from imploding. On another level, the paintings just happen in sequence, one thing leading to the next, with a matt, textured area, for instance, abutting one of high glaze.
Certain pigments have more texture than others. (She generally uses Old Holland and Cornelissen pigments.) She grinds her colours herself and all have different characteristics. For example, Alizarin violet has a marvellous grainy quality. Red oxide pigment also brings texture to the picture. Exploring the surface of the painting with the fingers reveals rough areas in counterpoint to the more expected smoothnesses.
She enjoys using pure colour next to something altogether more subtle, and relishes ‘slightly dirty shades of grey’. She has delighted in introducing muddier colours to her palette, extending its subtleties and the opportunities for contrast. For watercolours she buys a mixture of makes, with Sennelier a firm favourite. She uses Unison pastels, sticks of pure pigment handmade in Northumberland.
These new works are more paint-driven than ever. The energy is more visible, perhaps because realistic imagery has receded. The paint is given more and more autonomy: it is the principal player in these works. Murdoch says simply: ‘They could all end up like rainbows.’ She works in collaboration with the paint, allowing the medium to lead, provided it works within the parameters of her ideas for an image. Every mark needs a response until the image is resolved, and whether the mass of pictorial and compositional decisions required to finish a painting are made consciously or sub-consciously, they still have to be made. She often listens to music when she is working, particularly if a painting has paused. Listening to the same song again and again can be like a mantra for her, and can help to free an image. She also uses music as an aural prompt to get back to the same place in her mind and in her visual thinking. She pays tribute to this aspect of her process by adopting the song titles for the names of her recent paintings.
Murdoch has been trying to paint the big pictures like watercolours, allowing matt areas to form and remain, trying not to polish them too much or too obviously to ‘finish’ them. Artists often experiment with the idea of leaving paintings in a state of ‘unfinish’, believing it to result in a more dynamic state than a traditionally resolved image. I’ve worked closely with two artists whose later work engaged heavily with ‘unfinish’: Ken Kiff (1935-2001) and David Inshaw (born 1943). Kiff was surrounded by hundreds of unfinished works, so much so that the concept of ‘unfinish’ had assumed its own taxonomy in his work. He himself spoke of different categories: brushstroke unfinish, Cubist unfinish, time and fear and anxiety unfinish, modulation unfinish. As I wrote in 2001: ‘For him it was a question of intuitive timing, of letting the imagery develop organically, unfold, while he pondered all the options.’
Looking at the situation pragmatically, Norbert Lynton, good friend and long-time chronicler of his work, wrote: ‘Kiff wrestles with what he calls his “problem of finish”, but I suspect it is not a problem so much as an opportunity. He is not giving us edge-to-edge pictorial carpet; that would falsify his material and deprive it of natural growth.’ Likewise, David Inshaw exploits the potential in unfinish to great effect. Since the 1980s he has from time to time been tempted to leave a painting in its earliest incarnation, rather than pursue it through to its logical conclusion. Thus a large drawing on canvas began as the underdrawing for a painting, but worked so well as a complete statement in this drawn state that Inshaw felt compelled to leave it unpainted. In much recent work Inshaw has allowed himself to use his characteristic warm yellowish brown underpainting in the finished-unfinished image. Whereas once he would paint every inch of canvas in a final coat, he now uses the underpainting to add a sense of directness and urgency to his compositions. Nina Murdoch employs similar strategies.
The first of her most recent studies was of a subject found on the Isle of Mull in a derelict barn. (The painting she made from these studies, Song to the Siren, is a particularly resplendent achievement.) An external concrete wall with lichen on it when lit by sunlight sparked viridian, vermillion and green-gold. Capturing such a conflagration, it is easy (and tempting) to be too bright. Another subject was discovered in a dovecot attached to a 14th century ruin on a hill outside Bruton in Somerset. Murdoch describes these new studies as being: ‘Less about the subject, and more about the space, the feeling and the colour’.
Her working practice now actively involves trial compositions on a small scale, in which she can play with colour combinations without having to commit them to a major painting. When she has discovered the kind of colour layers and juxtapositions she wants to employ, she can then move onto a larger format working in tempera as before, but with a greater degree of knowledge to support and back up her investigations. However, she loves pastel and watercolour, and ignores the fact that, in the art establishment, watercolour remains a much underrated medium.
She floats the watercolour freely over the gesso base, initiating new confrontations of colour and patterns of mark. Although she can wash the watercolour back if it doesn’t look right, the combination of watercolour and pastel, with the pastel stroked over the top of the colour washes, is more difficult to remove. Of course she can sand it back, but will then risk losing the tooth of the board, which she has painstakingly created to hold the pastel pigment, by mixing 10% marble dust with the gesso. She comments: ‘I love the sense of jeopardy you get — if you mess it up, that’s it.’ The whole experimentation period is speeded up by working on these small panels: with the big paintings, Murdoch had to allow a layer to dry for three days before continuing over the top.
She has taken time to exploit the huge gain in spontaneity that working in these speedier materials has afforded. Her first excursions into the technique, exhibited in the Collecting Colour exhibition in 2018, were far more naturalistic evocations of the spaces she was painting about than she achieved in the big temperas. Her latest watercolour and pastel studies are marvellously free explorations of light and colour. They also have the kind of persistence that Murdoch values: each one is a re-examination of her chosen territory, embarked upon with the urgency more familiar to first beginnings, but also with the staying power of the long haul.
She admits she has deliberately made her method complicated, so that there isn’t a direct route from A to B. This intentional indirection seems to suit her: coming at things from different and unexpected angles is clearly inspirational. (Compare Shakespeare: ‘By indirections, find directions out.’) She says the process is about ‘coaxing’ what is ‘slightly out of reach — very elusive, slightly out of view — and not being too analytical about what I’m trying to do.’ She speaks of ‘trying gently to work my way through something to get there. But not quite sure how or why…’ And she concludes: ‘I find it so difficult what I do, and I think that’s what keeps me going. I love it. It’s just so complicated — but I’m trying to make it look not complicated, that’s really key. That I’m not really involved somehow. I like that: when you paint, you disappear.’
In her new paintings, stoked with colour and energy, the subject matter is simpler but the effects are more complicated. She builds tensions around certain passages, sands back others, leaves thin layers of glaze elsewhere. She is rightly ambitious for these new works. She is pursuing an ideal: as Wordsworth has it, ‘something far more deeply interfused’. She wants to make a flat wall with her images, but also to penetrate that wall and float in it, even to explode the wall. And she wants to achieve all these things simultaneously, as in a dream. Ultimately, she aims to discover how much chaos she can incorporate and still make a painting that works. Her large panels, images of great radiance and hope, have a grandeur and serenity rare in contemporary art. They are unexpected eruptions of beauty, appearing without warning and taking on unpredictable forms. We are privileged to have them in our midst.
Andrew Lambirth Devizes: July 2021 - April 2022
Notes and Sources
I am principally indebted to conversations with Nina Murdoch over the last decade, and for time spent in her studio. All quotations of her thoughts come from notebook scribblings made during those studio visits, and, most recently, from a taped telephone interview in March 2022.
The quotations from Inés Richter-Musso come from the exhibition catalogue Turner and the Elements, published by Hirmer Verlag, Munich, in 2011. The Rothko and John Elderfield quotations are taken from Seeing Rothko, edited by Glenn Phillips and Thomas Crow, Tate Publishing, 2006.
The Shakespeare quotation is from Hamlet (1607).
The Wordsworth quotation is from Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, (1798).