Artist Statement:
What is it with this insistence on labeling certain art works masterpieces? The best art is process. It’s surfing off the California coast at a cold sharky break that’s almost a mile off shore. A desolate twenty foot wave that crashes foam and deep green a mile west of the freeways and suburban sprawl, twenty minutes south of San Francisco. To be out in that alien environment, all senses on overdrive is the stuff of dreams/nightmares. Perceptions, choices, instincts, intuition. Lines that trace elegant decisions, then blunt, broad swipes of foam against huge pours of green and blue and grey.
Or Jimmy Hendrix's “God Save the Queen”, a rare, bootleg blues where Hendrix indulges all his largess and economy in a tone poem both familiar and very strange.
Allen Ginsberg’s fifty- year old poem, “Howl”, is another example of process resulting in a startling description of the alternative experience of true art making and perception. The academic poets rejected the piece, of course, and many still do today. Too disruptive, too free. Full of adjectives standing in for nouns, nouns disconnected from literal meaning, the whole thing full of love and perversion .
Education:
Born in Boston in 1942, Murray has lived in Los Angeles, Provincetown and Boston. For more than 35 years he has explored his bleak/sensual aesthetic through paints and mediums of all descriptions, as well as printmaking and assemblages.
He also teaches.
Education
School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Group Exhibitions
Davidson National Drawing Exhibition, Davidson NC
Silvermine International Print Show, Stamford CT
Montserrat School of Visual Art, Beverly MA
"Art of the State", Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University
"Ardent Gestures", Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University
Fuller Art Museum, Brockton MA
"New Painting New England", Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester NH
Solo Exhibitions
Gallery Naga, Boston MA
Atlantic Union College, Lancaster MA
"Mixed Message", Newton Free Library, Newton MA
"Delicious/Bleak", Newton Free Library, Newton MA
"Raw & Cooked", Holzwasser Gallery, New Art Center, Newton MA
Harvard Review, Autumn 2002
Awards/Grants/Publications
Massachusetts Artists' Foundation Grant in Painting
NEA Artists-in-the-Park Grant
Fellowship Fine Arts, Work Center Provincetown
Three Poetry Chapterbooks; M, Wanderlust, Johno O'Brien
Two Graphic Chapterbooks; Ravenna, Avis
