| Catherine Murphy | ||
| Birth Date: 1946 |
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Artist Gallery |
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| Catherine Murphy was born in Lexington, Massachusetts in 1946. Her father was an Irish musician, whose paying job was a postal worker.
Whether lithograph or oil paintings, Murphy is a realist of city scenes, lower middle-class figures, self-portrait, still-life and interiors. Murphy creates a solidly realist and moodily expressive views of herself and environment, often with windows looking out on some aspect of the urban or natural world.
Murphy attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York where her most influential teachers were Eugene Berman and Stephen Pace. They taught her to work painstakingly on her images, follow her own inclination, which was realism at a time when abstraction was dominant and look for inspiration to the Old Masters, especially Leonardo da Vinci, Jan Vermeer and Jan Van Eyck.
A turning point for Murphy was having her talents appreciated and promoted by June Blum, a prominent feminist artist who discovered Murphy’s work in 1971. Blum exhibited Murphy’s work on Long Island and New York Times art critic, John Canady wrote the following on September 19, 1971: “Miss Murphy’s picture of her mother napping in a corner of a garden is as fine a portrait as I have seen for a long time, going far beyond mere likeness and, for that matter, beyond the suggestion of character to fuse both within an evocation of mood and play”.
Murphy married sculptor Harry Roseman when they were students at Pratt Institute and working together, they lived in Hoboken and Jersey City because they could not afford housing in New York City. Urban life of these New Jersey cities provided much subject matter for her and from this vantage point she also painted distant views of New York.
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