Ides of March
James Austin Murray 03.12.2013 - 04.25.2013
James Austin Murray's solo exhibition, Ides of March is on view at Saint Peter's Church, March 12, 2013 - April 25, 2013. Free and open to the public, this installation is presented by Midtown Arts Common and Saint Peter's Church.
Opening reception
Meet the artist and view the work.
Friday, March 15 6:00 P.M - 8:00 P.M.
Gallery talk
You are invited to a gallery talk with Mr. Murray.
Sunday, March 17 1:30 P.M.
About the work
The color black, the subject of my painting, is all absorbing. It’s the hungriest of colors sucking all the visible spectrum into itself. The benefit of black is not only that it’s so deep, but the fact that paint is a pigment suspended in a binder. In oil pure black paint, absorbs the light spectrum and is also reflective.
To me these paintings are not about the dark, as some have wondered aloud. They are about the light they reflect. I find them full of light and strangely bright for being black paintings. It is their blackness that make the reflections so much more effective. They reflect the colors around them, because of this each one feels like a new painting when placed in a different setting.
When I started this practice I was working mostly on white paintings, doing detailed graphite drawings on them. The black paintings were a break away from my regular studio work of graphite and acrylic. I would pick one of three repeating patterns. This was a meditative action to relax me for the other work. After a couple of years of doing these in the studio as side work, they became a more and more important part of my studio work. When it became obvious that I was spending more time on these meditation paintings than the studio paintings, it gave me pause. The choice was obvious. I needed to do work that wanted to be done, not work that I was questioning. As my friend Alex Couwenberg told me once, ‘just paint like you mean it.’ This is that work.
NIGHT LEAVES 1969, OIL ON CANVAS, 48″ X 12″ X 4″, 2011
KILLING TIME (STUDY), OIL ON CANVAS, 12″ X 10″, 2011
BEMIS, MAY 2012
TAMESIS I, OIL ON CANVAS, 82″ X 128″ X 4″, 2011