OIL PAINTINGS

Pamela Murphy’s paintings are sometimes based on real people and animals and sometimes entirely imagined. She starts with photographs, usually vintage, and uses them to create paintings with many layers of paint that she scrapes or sands between applications. “I select figures from my large collection of old photographs to use as subjects for my paintings. I am interested in the fact that, although the people in the photographs may be strangers, they seem almost universally familiar. Living on a ten-acre farm, I am familiar with animals and the rural landscape, from which I also draw inspiration. All of my imagery has a strong sense of memory, history, and nostalgia, which the distressed surfaces of my canvases enhance”.

Pamela Murphy works mostly with a palette knife and rags to wipe glazes on and off her canvases. Through layers of paint, gold leaf and textured canvas applied, reapplied and scraped away she reveals the history of the canvas while enshrining the history of its subject. The quiet power of her work however lies in its dreamlike quality where peaceful muted subjects peer through hazy layers of time, history and collective memory. After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1991, Murphy went on to receive her Master of Fine Arts in India, from Visva-Bharati in Santiniketan.