NYAB Event - Courtney Murphy “Interludes”

Courtney Murphy “Interludes”

New Century Artists, Inc.

This event has ended.

When language fails its sole purpose, only visual statements are left to sublimely tell the story. It takes the most skilled and sensitive painters to fill the interlude between one thought and another, or between one movement in art and another with meaning. Courtney Murphy’s work is important and superb precisely because she has mastered that vocabulary.
The world we live in is built upon the idea of instant gratification, overindulgence, and graphic sexuality. People have become de-sensitized to drama, beauty and the element of mystery. When the pictorial space is stripped of presence of the human face, an alluring ambiguity arises.
The artist and viewer never see the faces of the women she paints, and some cases their heads are entirely cropped. Why? Is there an intimate privacy in which a woman is connected to her beauty or is there something more profound? Is the universal ego subsumed under the labyrinth of cultural draping in an all too complex modern world?
Courtney has always been drawn to paintings of the Neo-classical genre because of the use of striking color, dramatic light and elegant clothing. However, the expressionless women swallowed up by silk and satin and posed in static posture in that genre created an emotional void, which she moves to fill. In her work, these women embrace the elegant and formal nature of fashion and painting, yet are seen not as the passive wearer of garments but as the focus of a dramatic interlude that embraces elegance and feminine sensuality.
The subjects of Courtney’s work evoke sensations of strength to vulnerability. They are not specific people but instead represent the ideal of femininity, sensuality and elegant drama. She paints both full figures as well as intimate segments of figures and exquisitely examines the bare bones of narrative painting, leading the viewer, through body language alone, to a hint of possibilities in a glimpsed moment in time, yet allowing the viewer to complete each story.
There are layers of thematic depth on every canvas—but it is the vibrant use of color to communicate those social and philosophical arguments that makes her an important contemporary artist.
Courtney is an award winning painter who has shown extensively in the United States. Currently she is a full time Foundations Faculty member at the Art Institute of Washington Dulles. Courtney holds a BS in studio art from the University of California at Davis and an MFA in painting from the New York Academy of Art, and also studied at the California Art Institute, the Art Center in Pasadena and the Pont Aven School of Contemporary Art in Brittany, France.