ORIGINS

This exhibition encompasses two years of studio practice, from my residency in Pouch Cove Newfoundland to present. Broadly speaking, my work is based on memory of place or experience. I rarely sketch on site or refer to photographs, preferring to allow space to develop between immediate experience and studio work. This gap is important, as it allows my impressions to develop while allowing personal, material, and formal priorities to emerge. The result tends to be abbreviated form and space, where superfluous details are absent, and more personal reflection is developed. While this allows a wide latitude in building the work, it’s also important that the origins of place and experience are present, including colour, form, and sensibilities. This provides authenticity, so though the subject matter might be almost obscured, the work is still faithful to the original attributes of place and experience, as well as having allegiance to the formal plane and materiality of paint.

ORIGINS comprises roughly three series of work; Pouch Cove, The Burnt Forest, and ongoing Recent Work.

Pouch Cove (one month residency):
This landscape is terrifyingly dramatic if not outright violent, certainly in Winter. I isolated certain features that make this place unique, including the steep black coastline, trees growing impossibly out of vertical cliffs, remnants of slipways, and it’s distinctive sea colour. I set out to conjure, through paint, the visceral experience of witnessing this landscape, and completed an edition of twenty paintings.

The Burnt Forest:
A year after the HRM wildfires of 2023, I visited one of the areas hardest hit by the fire. The resurgence of nature was surreal and astonishing; the trees were so black as to appear to absorb all light, with small fissures of almost pure cobalt blue and cadmium red. The green of regrowth was jarringly vibrant, almost lit from within. The cycles of nature, both terrible and beautiful, are at the heart of this series.

Recent Work:
Loosely based on the Pouch Cove series, and recent experiences at sea and ashore, this body of work spans about two years, from my residency in Pouch Cove Newfoundland to present. “

— Ivan Murphy