Thomas Murray:



“Gait”, a short through the solipsistic wilderness. These paintings are grossly about how I look at things/ phenomena and process that information through generalization, approximation, and experimentation. They are about the way I seek to order information and beliefs. They are not about information and belief. The way I look at the looker looking at the looker looking at whatever it is that is out there, or in here is a frightening venture.
Some weeks ago I sat down with a friend and he assisted me in straightening out a statement for this show. That statement is lost in the laundry of life. In lieu of that succinct philosophy I offer you this.

It’s not so much an expression of something as much as an expression of “not something”. This proposal aligns itself perfectly with the newly completed painting “Gait”, a painting which stressed the apparently unimportant objects represented within a painting, objects which, when isolated, become meaningless as phonemes in a string from a baby’s mouth, like artists, it is so much easier to support the arts than risk becoming embrogued with an artist’s oeuvre.



I need to begin with a place, and laying the canvas down under a tree and capturing the shadows. This offered several things; a specific place and time, and enough chaos to see. Using and losing figures in and around the landscape became an integral part of the process. A few scattered pages from a lost book of Tibetan diagrams served as a sort of phrenological notion, much as da Vinci’s Study of Proportions (Vitruvius Man). These diagrams and the figures were pushed under the paint or pulled to the surface, much as I push myself, my body, my thoughts, my intentions.

Looking through stacks of older paintings in the dust of the studio I am both ecstatic and petrified to bring them to light. If I had my lens today that I used then I would be able to see myself looking out, hoping to catch a glimpse of myself as you, as a constellation, as an empty vessel, as important to this moment as every other moment, here, now. I feel like they were true once.

Trying to talk about spirituality is like trying to talk about the wind. I think there's plenty of it, and yet I can really only see the evidence; sand blowing, leaves moving, sea spray on a cold day at the beach. It is futile to point at the wind, as it doesn't exist in only a point. So, instead of talking about spirituality, I feel more comfortable talking around it (same thing?)
My commission as an artist is to find, and express, the truth (I know of no artist who has gone in search of a truth).
Quite often the expression bears the markings of finding the not-truths, pointing at the conventions in order to hopefully find the realities between the maps, the colors, the shapes, the relationships of things and no-things.

Redefining the shadows in a loose way, I overlay patterns of flowers from the pages of someone else’s recipe.. (Painting, always the truth and the lie) Wilderness becomes a gesture of the wild, and I am not quite the detached observer of that phenomenological smattering which is out there, that I insist is not in here, yet I feel is really all of us.

Thomas Murray earned his Masters in Fine Arts degree at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. He has received numerous awards such as the Florida Artists Fellowship and several awards of distinction. Widely collected throughout the Tampa Bay area and the United States, Thomas resides in Edinburg, Texas and currently teaches at the University of Texas-Pan American.

For more information visit his website at
www.thomasmurrayart.com




close this window