Her Double Bed metaphor, along with eight other oil paintings and seven graphite drawings, will go on view next week at Peter Freeman. All of the pieces in “Catherine Murphy: Recent Work” (March 6 to April 19) were completed in the last three years and consider the forces of scale, light, and perspective. Her paintings, so precise as to appear straight out of real life, are often multiyear projects, and they force you to slow down as you zoom in, taking in the minutiae of the weave of a blanket, the hem of a skirt.
Murphy is an observational painter, but often her scenes are ones she conjures and then meticulously builds in her studio or on her property in Poughkeepsie. For Double Bed, she couldn’t get close enough to the pillows on her actual bed, so she created a shorter version of it in her studio. She was also chasing the perfect lighting conditions, which inadvertently became the setup for another work.
“When I was painting Double Bed, I kept on having too much light in the room,” she explains, fired up at the memory of this particular puzzle. “So I put the shade up, and then I didn’t have enough light. I said, Well, I need to put a night-light in. So I stuck that up. And then this light was coming in every morning around the edges of the shade and I went, Oh, Jesus, that’s too much light. So I got a towel, I put that up. And then every time I was leaving the room after working on Double Bed I thought, There’s another painting here.” That other painting turned into Needs Must, titled after an old phrase Murphy’s mother often used.
Catherine Murphy, Needs Must, 2024.Courtesy of the artist and Peter Freeman, Inc.
Original Source: Read More Here
