Research for thesis: Elizabeth Murray

Artchive: Greg Masters' interview with and article about Elizabeth Murray...

"Her major accomplishment has been to find a way to express her emotional responses to an object, letting her passions go in abstract painting and, at the same time, fusing that rawness within a finely tuned precision, the shaped canvas. Though the boundaries of her canvas are often a bit eccentric, they restrain and give a form to the explosion of impulses. She's made a happy marriage between the exhilarating freedom to express of the action painters and the clean basics of the minimalists."-G. Masters about Murray's work

"She repeatedly opens herself up for examination, maintaining the vulnerability necessary for probing the self. The playful decorativeness, aggressive colors, large biomorphic shapes, are infused with an intense honesty and integrity in the process of relating the personal reaction to the geographic environment."-G. Masters

"That's a specific formal idea to have those shapes up there. In the beginning it feels like time breaks through the formal stuff and you get paint on it so that you begin to have ideas and it begins to get very emotional. That color feels like what you are at that particular day, particular moment, like what color feels like the right container for all those feelings."- E.Murray talking about how she starts a painting.
- It's interesting to me that she starts with an idea, but, once the paint gets flowing, she feels it all out and begins to depict emotions.

GM: When you started making shaped canvases?
EM: Yeh, it started with some very small paintings. I was reading books about Gestalt therapy and I was reading a lot about Zen at the time. Very briefly, I got very involved in Japanese Buddhism and Za-Zen. That was the spiritual thing in a way that was an influence to it but it was also very much from just looking at the Minimalists. What I needed was something, an underpinning for all my emotions, I really needed something to settle me down and some kind of a plate to put this stuff on. Then I began to understand what that was. It gave it some boundaries. I have a real desire for structure and for order. But also the chaos of the feelings feels like the thing that has to be in there. I think it's totally emotional. For the emotions to be seen you have to have a format.

GM: When you started making shaped canvases?
EM: Yeh, it started with some very small paintings. I was reading books about Gestalt therapy and I was reading a lot about Zen at the time. Very briefly, I got very involved in Japanese Buddhism and Za-Zen. That was the spiritual thing in a way that was an influence to it but it was also very much from just looking at the Minimalists. What I needed was something, an underpinning for all my emotions, I really needed something to settle me down and some kind of a plate to put this stuff on. Then I began to understand what that was. It gave it some boundaries. I have a real desire for structure and for order. But also the chaos of the feelings feels like the thing that has to be in there. I think it's totally emotional. For the emotions to be seen you have to have a format.

"I think it probably develops and evolves. I'm sure it does. I could be wrong about this. Who knows artistically what is right or wrong. You just do it. I change and things change and one thing seems to lead to another. For me that seems to be what happens in my work." - E. Murray talking about her work developing, changing and evolving over the years. I found her opinion to be rather comforting to me because this is how I feel most of the time about my work. I see all my peers having a set style and the work just progressing, but my mind frame changes and it's illustrated in my next pieces.

GM: Does the artist have a political responsibility?
EM: Yeah. I think so. More than ever. People say well, your work isn't specifically political. But I think that art is political. Being an artist is taking a kind of stand in relationship to the world. What I want my art to do is really make people feel things differently. Slow down and take a look and be provoked in almost any kind of a way. To see a kind of foreign object that maybe has some meaning that is jolting in some sense. It's not that I think I necessarily succeed or don't succeed. That's not what you're asking really. That's what I would want. I think that art does it in very different ways. I think that is political. The ultimate value in this society has always been money and art has always been the thing that's gone against that. I think the irony for me right now, that I have not come to terms with, is that I'm in this position where these are objects and as objects they're expensive. But to make them I have to make a certain amount of money. So I'm in this kind of bind where they have to sell. I want Paula to sell them. I don't mind that, I mean, I don't want them [laughs]. After I've done them I've gotten what I want out of it so it's fine with me that they sell. I think that the disturbing part is that the people who can afford to buy them are fewer and fewer. Most of the people who buy them are people that, politically, are totally on the other side of the fence than I am. Completely. I don't kid myself that their lives will necessarily be changed by having them.

~ I found this interview to be very helpful in understanding an artist I have idealized for so long. I already understood and knew that alot of "feminine" icons/symbols can be found from her work which could be because she draws influence from her everyday life. What I found interesting were her answers and how plainly spoken they were. I felt that in some ways my our process, inspiration and composition is very similar to Murray's. For example, how she emphasized painting being more about the emotions or emotional state. Most my work isn't commenting on global warming or our political/economic state, instead is focusing on the my emotions or thoughts that are occurring and influencing the decision in the piece I am working on the current moment. I guess it was just comforting to find out that I'm not working the 'wrong" way and that established and revolutionary artists like Elizabeth Murray shared some of the view points as me.