Idris Murphy

5 For Murphy ideas of relevance from this Indigenous context include the holistic and immersive experience intrinsic to its understanding, notions of both the moral and spiritual relatedness to landscape or ‘country’ and concepts of timelessness, dynamism and agency. Of parallel importance to Murphy, are the writings of 20th century, Austrian-born, Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber. Significantly are those proposed in his book I and Thou . In the catalogue to his 2009 exhibition I and Thou Murphy writes, By quoting extensively from Buber’s book I and Thou , I hope to elucidate his approach to confronting the visual – and show how this text might be useful in considering encounters with the land, generally, as well as with painting. His depictions of the difference between the truth of a painting and the truth about a painting become particularly significant. Buber’s writings have been a way of continuing my assessment of European paradigms in painting and have added to my encounter with Indigenous art. Buber’s ideas which resonate with how Murphy sees the world and how he ‘sees’ his painting is that “everything – picture, and movement, species and type, law and number, [are] indivisibly united…”. The primitive, brutal simplification of landscape form in the paintings of New Zealand artist Colin McCahon has also been an enduring influence on Murphy, especially how he integrated notions of both Christian and Maori spirituality. Murphy’s expressive vision and ambition for painting finds resonance with what McCahon saw in the land, “I saw something logical, orderly and beautiful belonging to the land and not yet its people. Not yet understood or communicated, not even really yet invented. My work has largely been to communicate this vision and to invent the way to see it.” The connection to landscape that Murphy tries to express in his work, also takes inspiration from ideas proposed by Gerard Manly Hopkins. In particular are the explanatory writings of his invented category of experience ‘Inscape’ which he uses to ‘personify’ all of Nature’s subjects. These include ‘transcendence’, ‘the soul of art’, ‘Plato’s philosophy of the ideal real world’, ‘the charged presence of the Creator in all forms of creation’ and unified complex of ideas associated with the expression of ‘the inner essence of an object’.