Have I ever seen a more sumptuous unmade bed in my life?
This is the first thought I have when I see Double Bed, a recent painting by the artist Catherine Murphy, during a December visit to Peter Freeman’s Tribeca gallery to preview work for her upcoming show. The painting’s appeal comes not from its opulence but from its familiarity. Murphy brilliantly split the picture in two, with each side of the bed occupying its own panel. On the left side of the diptych, two buttery yellow pillows are propped up, one with a perfectly head-shaped indent. “That’s my head. I’m the person sitting up, awake,” Murphy says. On the right side, the pillows lie prone—a suggestion that her husband, the artist Harry Roseman, is the sound sleeper of the two.
Murphy, often called one of the greatest living realists, has painted in a style that marries the banal with the profound since the 1970s. In her hands, simple items like a plastic bag of clothes, a garden hose, or buckets of water elicit deep feelings. For how straightforward they are, her scenes still find a way to provoke. “Paintings are a metaphor machine,” she says.
Her Double Bed metaphor, along with eight other oil paintings and seven graphite drawings, will go on view next week at Peter Freeman. All of the pieces in “Catherine Murphy: Recent Work” (March 6 to April 19) were completed in the last three years and consider the forces of scale, light, and perspective. Her paintings, so precise as to appear straight out of real life, are often multiyear projects, and they force you to slow down as you zoom in, taking in the minutiae of the weave of a blanket, the hem of a skirt.
Murphy is an observational painter, but often her scenes are ones she conjures and then meticulously builds in her studio or on her property in Poughkeepsie. For Double Bed, she couldn’t get close enough to the pillows on her actual bed, so she created a shorter version of it in her studio. She was also chasing the perfect lighting conditions, which inadvertently became the setup for another work.
“When I was painting Double Bed, I kept on having too much light in the room,” she explains, fired up at the memory of this particular puzzle. “So I put the shade up, and then I didn’t have enough light. I said, Well, I need to put a night-light in. So I stuck that up. And then this light was coming in every morning around the edges of the shade and I went, Oh, Jesus, that’s too much light. So I got a towel, I put that up. And then every time I was leaving the room after working on Double Bed I thought, There’s another painting here.” That other painting turned into Needs Must, titled after an old phrase Murphy’s mother often used.
It can sometimes take years, even decades, for a scene Murphy has thought of to come to fruition. The mischievous Under the Table (2022) was an idea she had back when she started painting. “I kept on thinking, How would I do that? I’m gonna have to lie on the floor. It’s gonna be impossible,” she recalls. Five decades on she figured out how to situate a table and chairs up on a platform in her studio. She had real people, including her husband, sit for her to get the placement right, but later she subbed in mannequins. (She has a lot of mannequins, she tells me—helpful when a painting can take years to complete.)
One of the figures in Under the Table wears a lovely homemade blue-and-green skirt, a Goodwill find, that also appears in Bed Clothes. That painting is heavy on movement. Above the skirt, a red jacket sits up at attention, and a cozy pair of canary socks wiggle at the bottom edge. “The thing I liked about putting this painting together is that you naturally read it in perspective. You go in, but then the color acts like a Slinky, and it brings it back down again,” Murphy says.
Murphy did not always paint this way. In the 1960s, she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture before getting her BFA from Pratt. She graduated into an art world that was big on heady abstraction, but something about that style didn’t work for her. “I did a lot of acting in high school and college, and I felt like I was on stage when I was painting. And I said, This isn t right. I am not this person.”
She started from scratch, almost resisting style as she went about channeling what she saw out her window or in her home. In taking the real world as her subject, Murphy found a connection to something greater. She remembers a pivotal moment early on: “I was standing in my parents’ backyard, painting the suburban street in front of me. I was working on a tree about a quarter mile away and a breeze moved through it. I couldn’t feel it on my skin but it moved through my whole body…. I called it my post-Emersonian, existential moment. And I said to myself, How could I ever not do this?”
Crucially, Murphy is not a photorealist, who use photographs as their subjects. “My paintings are very influenced by photography and very influenced by film,” she says, but photographs as a subject are not “conceptually meaty enough” for her. Her work is not actually about the detail; it’s about a different kind of clarity.
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At one point early in our December visit, Murphy, now in her late 70s, walked over to Still Living, a five-and-a-half-foot-tall painting of a damaged white pine on her property, and gave it the kind of heartfelt hello you’d greet an old friend with.
Perhaps this intimacy comes from the care-intensive process of making her paintings, to get at the essence of a thing. And for this one, unlike the pieces made in her studio, Murphy couldn’t control the light outside. She had to be patient, working only when the weather cooperated. Sitting out in the woods, she piled on her paint in thick layers, to the point where the bark becomes almost abstract. Which is fitting: Still Living is not just a painting of a tree; it’s a painting of resilience—the pine’s, hers, and ours.
I had never seen this particular tree in real life, but still I could feel the way the painting—like so much of Murphy’s work—seemed to say “Welcome back.”