Corridors, steps, wedges of light and otherworldly colour, Nina Murdoch's paintings evoke an uninhabited but haunting world in which the sun and moon seem to rise and set in chambers indoors.
Although some of these images may in fact be street subjects, the sense of enclosure is strong, partly because the focus has been taken inwards, and instead of wider views of architecture (as appeared in her earlier work), we are offered broad yet confined spaces. This contradiction goes to the heart of her work: she engages with macro as well as micro, with the inner world as much as with external reality. Her paintings were never especially descriptive of place, more evocative of mood, and now they are increasingly about emotional states.
Her work began with figures, progressed to figures in landscape, which subsequently developed into inhabited landscapes devoid of people. From there, she has moved increasingly towards abstraction, but without losing touch with the physicality of the world she still wishes to evoke. She says she didn't want the narrative or the sense of scale which figures inevitably confer: 'figures can stop you going into the space of the picture'. On the other hand she has to beware of growing too abstract in her imagery. Not long ago she chose to destroy a group of paintings that were so abstract they had become divorced from the urban reality which remains her touchstone. She needs a particular place - or at very least a particular space - around which to build a painting. She has to ground the picture in order to give the viewer a point from which to float off into reverie.
In the work done between 1995 and 2001, the buildings were simplified to blocks, as if carved from stone, and much more sculptural than architectonic. These blocks were windowless but not featureless, for the subtlety of her paint surfaces ensured that character was essential and individual to each facade and volume. Already the chief feature of her work was an extended interplay between subtly modulated paint surfaces and the shapes and forms set within the illusory space of her pictures. And the space itself was treated with great particularity: folded down below the girders of a bridge, cramped between buildings, caught in an underpass, or levelling off above flat modernistic rooftops. In some of those high viewpoint roofscapes, Murdoch echoed the neon-lit skypaths and hurtling perspectives of that futuristic classic, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. The mood may not have been quite so frenetic, but Murdoch's compositions are by no means still: she conjures a sense of inexorable movement, of the constant flux of existence, from the lively yet understated direction of her paint. Her pictures are not idealized or frozen moments, they are living statements - bulletins from the front-line of urban existence.
Although people don't feature in these paintings, everywhere there is evidence of their ambition and their achievement. The built environment is Murdoch's subject, and although she depicts it un-peopled, it is not deserted. There is no sense of desolation or dereliction to these images. Rather, it's as if the inhabitants had just popped out to the pub round the corner and left the city with the lights on and all its appliances gently humming. The buildings have been much lived-in: they are not pristine examples straight from the architect's office, but worn and well-used, a bit rubbed around the edges. This is where the medium that Murdoch employs helps to convey her meaning, for her use of tempera requires a great deal of change and sanding back of paint. The slightly abraded surfaces of the paintings thus echo the aged fabric of the buildings depicted.
As her work has developed, the references to specific places, even to particular buildings, have diminished, and the overt appearance of the paintings has become more abstract. The focus has moved in, and instead of cityscapes, however aethereal or generalized, the subject is now more likely to be the fall of light on a street corner or across a wall. Yet the place itself has not changed: Murdoch still mostly paints an area of Battersea intimately familiar to her, the concrete fields of the city she loves.
She dreams cities, and to put herself in the correct frame of mind to gain access to her dreams in order to paint them, she makes herself fall asleep briefly before beginning work. (This is not unprecedented. I remember the surrealist Eileen Agar telling me that if she felt stuck with a painting she would invariably take a short snooze and awake with the solution. There was a daybed in her studio for just such creative napping.) Cities of the mind grow out of experience and imagination, and Murdoch spends a great deal of time in her imagination, as well as hours wandering the streets of London. Her grandparents and uncles were architects and she has inherited a strong sympathy with buildings, with the physical fabric of a city. 'I feel terribly emotional towards place and buildings,' she admits. She thinks in three-dimensions all the time she's working in two, maintaining in her head an imagined/remembered place whose reality informs the painting she is making.
Her process involves applying as many as 40 layers of tempera to a panel ready prepared with six layers of gesso, and using lots of water and fine sandpaper constantly to change the surface. Hers is, quite literally, a very fluid approach. She washes back the surface, and puddles paint on it, and when it's dry she separates the layers of colour with glazing medium to preserve their independence. And then she sands back through the layers searching for the right combinations of colour. She likes to keep in close contact with the light-emitting white of the gesso ground (much as a watercolour painter uses the white of the paper), and frequently sands back to it. She readily admits this is not the traditional approach to tempera: 'I don't use it how you're meant to.' It took her 10 years to devise her own approach, and she's still changing and developing it.
Her working practice is as much a process of excavation and removal as it is of application. She is happy to exploit chance in her archaeological delving through the layers of her paint, as she doesn't always remember what order she put on the colours in the first place. There is therefore a degree of lucky coincidence in the process. Yet there are no short cuts to achieve the effects she aims for, and all the time the process is growing more complex, as technically she becomes more proficient and more ambitious.
She sees her role as collaborator rather than autocrat: 'I try not to direct it at all'. Much takes place at a subconscious level - hence the need to access the half-sleeping, half-waking world of dream. Encouraging a state of receptivity is for Murdoch essential; always she needs to be in the right frame of mind. Each painting takes months to reach resolution, in a process of change and debate in which colour is as important as light, but in which light provides the structure.
Murdoch has grown increasingly adept at illuminating her darkness. She is particularly good at the way light simultaneously reveals and dissolves form, and at the way a shadow drops. Look at the line and curve of projected buildings in her paintings - their silhouettes make force-fields on road and pavement. The effects of light can be startling: the transformation of a grimy city street to an incredible blue or a pearlescent pink. She feels a deep need to witness the moment, and this is one of the main urges which power her vision. Winter is the best season for finding a subject, because the light is bluer. Murdoch often chooses the cold light of early morning for harvesting the image. The passing moment is just that, and 'if you miss it you can never find it again'. The same thing is true of the painting process and its chance concatenations of light and shape - retrieved material from the matrix of the layered board mixing hazardously and momentarily with the most recently achieved surface. She has to take risks and act; she can't afford to be precious.
Murdoch's work is replete with overtones and undertones, dense with references. 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'. She paints details now, fragments not cities, and concentrates on making patterns work convincingly with space and light. Her colour is like curdled light, her palette has brought the sky down to earth, and through the distinctive streaks and macular stipplings she has discovered in her paint surfaces, she summons the stars into the reflecting mirror of her facades.