Idris Murphy

33 Paul Martin and Idris Murphy first met in London at the age of 22. After a lifetime spent making and painting, teaching and learning, they met again in Perth, Western Australia, a meeting that sowed the seed of this exhibition. In conversation they discovered much common ground: both had developed a deep concern for the environment and in their landscape painting both had been drawn to fragile and imperilled ecosystems, the ‘edgelands’ which give this exhibition its title, all the while seeking an understanding of what Martin has called ‘the gritty sacredness of places and things’ . In addition they had been proposing to themselves similar questions about the nature and purpose of landscape painting itself. Edgelands is in part a response to those questions; it also invites viewers to pose questions of their own – what is it to look at a landscape painting, or indeed a landscape? Part of what links Martin and Murphy as landscape painters is their insistence that art involves an engagement with nature, with that which is not art. Murphy has written elsewhere of his painting expeditions to the Australian bush and desert, which, he says, offer him enough to last him a lifetime; Martin’s works meanwhile frequently incorporate natural materials obtained from the very landscapes he paints. Both men would reject an art that is self-reflexive, an art that refers only to art, an art reduced to a facile, if admittedly sometimes dazzling, po-mo play of surfaces. Which is not to say that surfaces aren’t important of course: as Jean Dubuffet wrote, ‘the purpose of painting is to decorate surfaces, and it therefore effects only two dimensions and excludes depth’ , a comment that seems particularly relevant to the work of Idris Murphy. However Dubuffet also said, ‘I want painting to be full of life – decoration, swatches of colour, signs and placards, scratches on the ground’, and the relation of art to life is a primary concern of both Murphy and Martin. While an engagement with nature is important, it is doubtful whether we can ever view a landscape with an entirely innocent eye: the landscape is always imaginatively transformed. In a celebrated passage in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, the central character, Duncan Thaw, is asked why no one ever notices the beauty of Glasgow. He replies, ‘because nobody imagines living here ... if a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.’ As with a city, so with a landscape: travellers to Italy in the early 18th century, we are told, would close the curtains in their carriage on crossing the Alps to shield their eyes from the abhorrent and frightful scenes of desolation all around. Less than a century later, after art had discovered the sublime, these same scenes would draw tourists from all across Europe. When the first convict transports arrived in Australia in 1788, that country had undergone no such imaginative transformation and an examination of the diary entries of the officers of the first fleet reveal a mixture of bafflement, and responses that baffle us today. One compares the landscapes of what would become Sydney to ‘a deer park, as if intended for the purpose’ , while another talks of ‘terass’s, lawns and grottos, with distinct plantations of the tallest and most stately trees I ever saw in any nobleman’s ground in England’ . Of course, this was not in fact an EVERYTHING WATER EVERYWHERE GODS