Anthony Murphy Solo

About

Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1956 Anthony has lived and worked near Carcassonne, France since 1992. He attended Westminster School in London and during his teenage years enjoyed success as an actor, receiving an Emmy award for his performance in ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays’. The artist then went on to become a lawyer working in both Britain and France before becoming a painter full time, exhibiting on a regular basis over the last twenty years. Simplistic in structure, Murphy’s paintings allow the two-dimensional canvas to dominate the forms of the composition, reflecting an exploration of space. With a strong tonal palette, the artist chooses an array of subjects from townscapes to still life to people engaging in everyday activity. “Trial and error are my great masters. A painting is nothing more or less than a series of brush strokes; and of each stroke one may say: If you like it, leave it; if you don’t, wipe it off. In my search for colours that move, much of a picture will end up as rags around my feet. Why some people are painters seems partly to do with this persistent desire to correct and alter the image. This persistence and tenacity can suggest that the completed image exists somewhere already, in the way Plato proposed. In fact a quiet hope of mine is to discover, on death, that the heavenly substance from which, say, all pears draw their “pearness”, looks a bit like one of my paintings.”