Murray-Orr’s tiny paintings are postcard-sized panels of colour, tone, and fastidious mark-making. At first glance, they appear to be made with a fluid, almost casual ease - and yet on closer inspection reveal themselves as inched into existence, with every tiny touch of paint carefully composed.
It’s a process that depends on intuition rather than intellect, discovery rather than design, faith rather than logic. They are landscape paintings, or at least they take the form of landscape, but only in as much as their language depicts familiar features of the natural world - a hill, a horizon, a cloud - but these are the tools of topography used to explore and express an emotional or mental state, rather than to define any geographically specific location. They are tiny poems.
Says the artist: “I work on several images at any one time, adding and removing pigment as it seems obvious to do so and leaving [them] alone when in doubt. Time and intuition, rather than thought usually provide the answer. Most of the images have been worked on for a year or more, some considerably longer. For me, creativity requires a certain ignorance. It’s a profoundly dumb process, a combination of love and faith. It’s nothing else. When I don’t know what I’m doing I simply put the painting down and pick up another. One mark will alter everything. It’s a continuous process.”
Murray-Orr’s new paintings will be joined by a series of sculptures from found wooden objects – faces from chair seats and sinuous body forms from a discarded crutch and a bentwood chair frame. These curiously anthropomorphic and deeply characterful objects appear to inhabit a very different world from the paintings and yet seem connected by a sense of memory, personality and a loving touch.
It’s from this place of emotional intimacy that Murray-Orr’s quietly assertive works emerge from the edge of abstraction. A new book Thirty Paintings will be published to coincide with the exhibition and will be available from October 1.
