Since her last exhibition in 2014, a crisis occurred in Nina Murdoch's art, when her paint suppliers ceased to manufacture the glazing medium she had been entirely reliant upon to keep her layers of tempera separate. Without it she was effectively unable to make her paintings.
A crisis of this sort can often generate useful change and desperate measures, and while she was waiting for another supply to be sourced, Murdoch experimented with other media. Specifically, she began working in pastels over watercolour on small panels, mixing marble dust with the gesso to provide a key to the surface to hold the pigment. Suddenly her work was dramatically speeded up, and she was able to make a series of studies in which to explore her ideas, each of which would take a day rather than a year (which might be the duration of one of her large tempera panels). The powdery quality of the surface of these pastels was also very different, but there was enough in common in the application of colour and generation of light to establish a continuity of research. The new medium also offered opportunities to simplify the imagery and make it more spontaneous. These smaller studies have effected a remarkable loosening up of approach that is now being felt (with a new source of glazing medium) in the larger panels.
Part of her research for the new work required a trip to Paris to reacquaint herself with Monet, and his great water lily paintings at the Musée de l'Orangerie. Monet concentrated on painting water lilies for the last 30 years of his life, observed in his famous garden at Giverny, eventually making some 250 paintings of the subject. The Orangerie holds eight large water lily murals in two specially-built oval rooms, and these were the focus of Murdoch's visit. One of the things to be reaffirmed by looking again at Monet was a sense of urgency: in these magnificent late paintings, Monet, beset by age and failing eyesight, felt the urgency of ultimate deadlines. Murdoch finds herself responding to this too. Not in the sense of hurrying at a painting or trying to complete it quickly, but in the word's secondary meaning: earnest and persistent in demand. Entirely serious about her paintings she wants them to be persistent rather than hasty; but at the same time is also happy to encourage them to unravel slightly, and become looser in handling - more urgent in appeal.
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. She is well aware of the ease with which an artist can become comfortable with his or her solutions to problems, and then slip into habits of picture construction. Likewise she recognizes the temptation to tidy up too much. To combat these routines and constrictions, she speaks of letting go of the anchor. Her imagery now seems almost to be floating off the panels, as if in water or a dream, the paint more fluid but the colour more specific. Murdoch builds up the colour in particular areas with glazes; in other areas the gesso ground might be showing through. She gathers together clusters of paint, alternating built-up passages with transparent ones. Likewise, she collects little things from everyday sites - glimpses of things seen. Her gathering of incidents is like the tide going in and out, with flotsam and jetsam being deposited on the beach. Painting for her is like orchestrating presences (the colours), and making up stories in the paint. She makes melodramatic visions of such normal, quotidian things.
Time is fluid but contained in these paintings like mercury in a jar, quicksilver held within limits. Although the genesis of all her paintings remains in the external observable world, in the latest temperas scene and action are more like fictions of the mind than external realities. 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. She is a maker of coloured signs in the Joycean sense. ('Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and wrack, the nearing tide, the rusty boot. Snotgreen, blue silver, rust. Coloured signs.' James Joyce: Ulysses.) Her work partakes of the epiphanic (the Joycean epiphany is defined as a sudden spiritual manifestation), and exists in those states of the creative mind so memorably evoked by Gerard Manley Hopkins as inscape and instress. He thought of inscape as the unique design that constitutes individual identity, an identity not static but dynamic; and instress as the recognition of other individualities in an intense concentration of energy.
It seems right to be talking of Murdoch's paintings in terms of literary modernism, for their context (and content) is essentially poetic and allusive (also elusive), by no means straightforwardly descriptive. 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. Samuel Beckett referred to his own work as 'a stain upon the silence', and in parallel to this thought Murdoch's work might be seen as a stain upon the darkness - a gorgeous stain of rainbow light. I have written in the past of Murdoch's painting as exemplifying a kind of urban baroque. Now, as it moves further from its referents, it might be more properly categorized as abstract baroque, but the term doesn't carry the right measure of sheer organic delight that drives her work. Paint is the key energy of her imagery: not line or the creation of space, not even colour or the evocation of a particular place. Paint, and the remarkable way it is applied, is everything.
Her methods and procedures are by now familiar: she works flat upon a table, building up as many as six layers of gesso on the wooden panels she favours, and then some 40 layers of tempera in often tiny increments of colour. She works in intense bursts, not stopping for three or four hours on one painting. She might work on two or three at once, but confine one to one day, another to the next. In terms of imagery, she tends to put everything in to start with, then to conduct a process of elimination, removing whatever is not strictly essential to the picture. She has simplified the subject matter to allow room for the painting: in effect, the paint itself has assumed greater importance in these new pictures.
Murdoch prepares herself for the act of painting, usually by sleeping a little to set her unconscious mind free to work on the problem before her. In the same way that a writer might enact a scenario between his leading characters in his head, Murdoch focuses on what she might achieve in the next painting session. She goes into herself in order to bring forth wonders. (Art's roots in magic may be sensed here.) But the shamanic aspect of the activity should not be over-stressed. For all her thought and guiding, she follows the paint, collaborates with it. The work makes its own demands, and every mark requires an echo or response. This is not to say that it doesn't have meaning, but the whole thrust of the new work is less to do with specifics and more about the universal. Her main tools and components are time - especially in the making of and looking at the work - colour, and light. There are paintings here one would happily spend hours quietly contemplating.
Titles come after the paintings have been completed. Quite often Murdoch will find herself halted and unable to resolve a painting, and she has adopted various strategies to deal with this block. One of her most successful is listening to the same song over and over again. This can help to free an image. The song changes from painting to painting, and in this new body of work she acknowledges and celebrates this intimate relationship between image and music by adopting the song titles as names for her paintings. This new context provides new echoes and resonances, and such titles as Soft as Chalk or Il Tramonto bestow a extra layer of meaning beyond their personal significance for the artist.
Consider In the Upper Room, in which light falls like molten lava from an oculus, or the wedge of gold central to Return, or the pool of mysterious luminescence in Wait. All these are images on the brink of the sublime: a sense of grandeur without the terror; they would be apocalyptic if they weren't so overwhelmingly otherworldly and serene. The references are multifarious, and we each see here fragments and aspects of our own experience, given back to us through a distinctive new interpretation and with unexpected beauty. Some might find in Il Tramonto the end-of-the-world pyrotechnics of a judgement scene by the English Romantic painter John Martin, so influential on generations of movie-makers, from DW Griffith to Cecil B DeMille and George Lucas. For myself, I think again of Hopkins and that supremely evocative line in his poem Pied Beauty: 'Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings'.
In I was just Thinking, the light event - the action, so to speak - shifts off the right side of the panel, and the walls are beginning to dissolve though joins and edges are still visible. Murdoch is not yet ready to forsake entirely the visual facts observed in the real world. Complete abstraction is not for her. As she says: 'I want a space to go into - I want to keep it a space.' But we might be forgiven for thinking that these are spaces of the soul, so transformed are the glimpses of mundane reality that spark off these darkly transcendent objects of meditation. I can think of no one painting quite like this, or offering quite so much solace in a troubled world.