The pursuit of feeling: Fiona Murphy’s fresh eyes for the ordinary world
In her decades-long career, the artist has gone her own way, creating unapologetically fresh work that feels at once experimental, personal, and particularly relevant
By Milan Sime Martinic
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| Fiona Murphy |
Inside the house, seated at the tall kitchen counter/breakfast table across from her kitchen and staring at stairs that lead to the second floor is a room that is both her living area and her own personal gallery. There is little distinction between the rooms, but the entire area is displaying a dozen paintings of all sizes; that is when you realize she has painted the planters there too, like the ones at the entrance. They are, in fact, pieces of her art arrayed to complement the paintings on the walls. Altogether, they make it clear you are in the house of an artist who lives her work.
It is an artistic joyride that challenges your notions of how an artist’s body of work is supposed to look and what it could be about. “No meaning,” she says. “I try to capture a feeling.” There is packed significance in that that we will explore below; but beyond that threshold, the rules of engagement have changed, it is clear now that she does not easily fit into any one mold of artist.
Without a mask now, behind faint laughter lines her intensity is evident. Those Irish eyes are not smiling, but there is power in them. As she talks, she has a tendency to cast those acutely woven green/brown threads onto a space somewhere between you and the rest of the universe. There is a curiosity and interest in them that she admits is the essence of her art, in those moments, you can see her mind at work, alternately intense and drifty.
She is a complex, analytical thinker, an artist who makes simple forms speak powerfully in the language of feeling in a manner that can be at first unsettling, then strangely comforting, and —upon reflection— intensely interesting. She works the colors and shapes, lights, and shadows well, but her art is about the essence beyond the visual perception of the physical subject, the life that might be there in any one moment.
In her development as an artist, Murphy has gone through many phases; in her current phase she is focusing her work on a Brasilia series, imbuing her work with a passion, thoughts, and playfulness that speak calmly, without urgency, in the language of feeling. There is a critical, cerebral edge in her strive to depict scenes of the city that convey their inner states of ephemerality.
If architecture is frozen music, then Brasilia is an edgy concert, at times whimsical, full of a specific kind of beauty and form, and designed to elicit emotions of future and destiny, of values and belonging. That is both the worth and the challenge in front of her.
The city has a special relationship with its sky, its sea, the locals call it, and how it interacts with the skyline of its buildings. Murphy’s Brasilia paintings capture the excitement of the juxtapositions in a unique and powerful way that subtly translates the vibe of the city through an artistic communion with its architecture,
She has been depicting familiar places in simple shapes with complex tugs at the way we feel life, as in her depiction of Brasilia’s iconoclastic cathedral against pastel tones of sky. She contrasts its white and blue design with a range of light tints of red capturing the unusual, the peculiar, the Cerrado setting of the city with its iron dust and the feelings it claims from us – under her brush, a religious building becomes a moment of prayer between city and sky.
Taking it in.
Dominating the room is a large abstract and colorful aerial close-up of the city’s modernist elements from a perspective a few thousand feet up in the air — the silhouette of its landmark Juscelino Kubitschek Bridge, the trademark “tesourinhas” – clover leaf exchanges in the city’s thoroughfares, and Brasilia’s unique superquadra urban design in a mashup that is a reflection on the worlds beyond worlds and times beyond times in front of us.
The interplay of color, focus, and forms of the city create a profound impressionistic beauty that elicits an emotional response when the familiar is recognized outside the bounds of everyday experience. “Feeling” in a way you did not expect.
On a side wall, the futuristic dome of the National Museum is the subject of a mid-sized painting in her Brasilia series. White and light rise to the sky with acute but moderated wattage drawing the Oscar Neimeyer geometrical shapes against the blues of the Brasilia sky and the gray of its concrete plaza.
It is not so much how she sees the building, as is the feelings it extracts from you about what lies behind it, playing the many-sidedness of things, conveying feelings of time and timelessness.
Indeed, it is art that stops time and makes us think about our own surroundings. The small outline of a man in apparent proportion to the buildings ensures that the geographic moment is kept alive. One can almost feel the little black silhouette’s desire to take on the magnitude of the structure, the bigness of the setting.
So, it is Brasilia coming alive on a canvas on Murphy’s wall in a simple but intense experience that keeps percolating in your memory long after you see it. This has the effect of revealing something much bigger about the building, about life, time, and change. It is a minimalist style that brings on big feelings without unnecessary frills, it is work that seems forever on the verge of becoming something else.
The obvious brushstrokes that depict the man give the painting an unfinished feel, but Murphy says she stops when she has the feel she wants. Life isn’t finished. The analysis goes on. Feelings change. Yes, that is what I feel.
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| More of Murphy's Brasilia series |
Across the room, one of Murphy’s paintings is buzzing with a delicious pull. A meticulously drawn lemon slice large-scale painting is transfixing in its detailed perspective of juicy citrus pulp. Her use of a smaller brush to give the slice texture makes it feel like it is something you can taste. It is a heightened approach to realism that borders on the personal.
She tells how she began the process, drawing each vesicle, each line of gleam in each bulbous pulp, then each slice of pith, enthralling herself in the freehand process until she had her entire creation in front of her.
It is as if her imagination and subject had a direct connection. The result feels authentic, unembellished yet bigger than life, and loaded with a feel of reverence and fancy.
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| Acrylic on canvass |
Taken together, her paintings surrounding you punch above their weight. They can puzzle you, challenge you, play with you, start a conversation, perhaps an inner debate as to the feelings they evoke, even uplift you without concern as to what they mean. “It does not mean anything, it is a feeling,” says Murphy.
It is a feeling that sets up illusions that lay the language of painting before your eyes as her dashes and rashes of paint draw you into her images with an intensified attention.
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| A Murphy polyptych of Brasilia shapes and shaddows |
Like her eyes, her paintings speak an inner language, yet it is the extraordinary story of her life that holds the key to the magnitude of the artist she is, and reveal what is behind new creations
A mind enriched through travel.
Born in Cork County in southern Ireland, she was drawn to art at an early age, sketching fish and other things and focusing on the details, miffing her father with her artistic persistence. It would lead her to study at one of Europe’s finest art schools, the Limerick College of Art and Design.
Her next stop was the creative environment of Florence, the city that celebrates the triumph of the power of art. There, among the marble of Michelangelo’s David and some of the finest paintings of the Rennaissance, she flourished into the student that becomes the teacher going from there to teach orphans in rural, agricultural northeastern Brazil.
Her transformation continues as she nears the turn of the century with a turn at the International school of Havana, Cuba teaching and interacting with children from around the world and her personal growth moves from Monet impressionism and realism to experimenting that forges her own style.
She tells how she saw the old, gray city of Havana and turned that disappointment into a community project to add color to the city painting murals on schools, hospitals, and other Havana walls.
Incessant and untiring, Murphy expanded her own personal journey using Fidel Castro as her subject. Her unique “Fidel Series” perspective depicts Castro after an emaciating illness took him from the public eye looking as the archetypal Don Quixote across multiple works. The unified series tells a story but, more revealing, it lays out the depth and breadth of her art and skills.
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| The "Fidel Series,' Murphy explores her subject's multiple dimensions using different techniques |
She held an exposition of her Fidel Series in Havana securing a nod in Cuba, Murphy has held exhibits of her works in every city she has lived, though a Brasilia exposition is still to come.
It was in Havana that her life took a personal turn when she met her international journalist husband. Their life together took her to Washington, DC, where she taught at a private school and at the famed Oyster-Adams DC public school. She would go on to live and paint and to teach in Quito and eventually Brasília.
For the last 5 years of her 9 years in the city she has been Visual Arts teacher and Head of the Art Department at the American School of Brasilia, currently overseeing the artistic development of some 90 students.
In Murphy, the high calling of teaching takes on a particular bend. She describes her approach, letting the extraordinary happen in the mind of the student; she seems just as curious to discover how her students discover the universal design practices on their own, exploring to their fullest. She explains the care she takes, being cautious they do not feel limited by anything, even any rules, Murphy lets them discover that by themselves.
Under her direction art class becomes a net for catching each student’s talent. She expertly provides a subtle scaffolding in which a student can find oneself, to experiment in bringing a creation into being with originality and freedom.
It is a teaching style that trains students to develop skills to find answers and solutions through exploration. Time and patience are a must, as Murphy describes it, giving students time to connect and find their own relevance. Each creation is a risk, each work is done when it feels done. Under her tutelage, the kids are the show, the teacher is the audience; creativity meets possibility and prepares to meet the world on fields beyond art.
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| Murphy |
That is Murphy’s peculiarly vital quality —a mixture of curiosity, intensity, passion, and joy as much in her teaching as in her art. It is validated by her own personal experience; she estimates that 80 percent of her students apply what they learned in her art classes in their future lives. She is shaping young minds by helping them face themselves in art class.
That is a particular relevance in art we can enjoy, and in affecting young people’s lives — two different paths along the same road in helping others feel the experience of seeing life with different eyes.
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Brasilia's Dom Bosco Sanctuary Channels the Prophetic Destiny of Brazil
The city built a monument to a transformational revelation that recognizes a symbolic mission for itself and the country
(As published in the Rio Times)
By Milan Sime Martinic
It is said that every country is an evolving spiritual entity grappling with its destiny. Brazil’s capital is particularly spiritual in searching for its soul and personality to symbolize its role in the country’s greater destiny and to influence the national consciousness.
If one could see the light of the spiritual soul of Brasilia it would be a majestic blue as we imagine the heavens to be. If you could enter the spiritual heart of the symbolic and well-thought-out city it would be a grand structure that hides at its center, just under the surface, beating with meaning and destiny and working as an essential tool of the divine forces. It is the blessing and good fortune of all who live and pass through Brasilia that such a place exists, that it is real, and that it is welcoming, and that it has the power to reach into your own soul and thread the cityscape and your moment there as a long line of events destined to be— This transcendental place meant as the spiritual heart and soul of the city is the Sanctuary of Dom Bosco -Santuário São João Bosco- a massive monument to destiny and to the spiritual flags the universe placed there long ago.
Bathed in the blue light that comes through its 80 floor-to-ceiling panels of stained glass, the building that sits along Earth’s 15th parallel throws its image onto those who enter its white marble floors, surrounding body and spirit in an embrace that began in 1883 when the Italian priest and educator Dom Bosco foresaw Brasilia in a dream of prophecy.
Dom Bosco related his dream in which he envisioned an extraordinary New World capital, a utopian civilization that would flourish “at the point where a lake was formed,” between the 15th and 20th parallels to lead a promised land of inconceivable wealth, a great nation. These things will happen in the third generation," wrote Dom Bosco. Brasilia, situated between the 15th and 16th parallels and built in 1956 by the third generation after Dom Bosco’s death, is widely accepted among Brazilians to be that place.
"The mysterious forces that rule the world have acted in such a way as to ... create the opportunity to convert the old dream into reality," wrote Joscelino Kubitschek, the Brazilian president who inspired and spearheaded the construction of Brasilia; the capital is often referred as “the city Dom Bosco dreamed of.”
Built between 1963 and 1970, the sanctuary is a Gothic-style square cathedral of 80 columns wrapping all four sides and reaching 16 meters high, topped by Gothic arches that evoke sentinels of heaven. Pink stained glass at the four corners gives a preternatural frame to the 12 shades of blue to purplish-blue stained glass that fill the columns in some 140,000 squares designed by Sao Paulo architect Cláudio Naves and manufactured by the Belgian artist Hubert Van Doorne. Dotted with tinier white squares, the blue background looks like a starry sky as you enter and invokes heaven itself, creating a celestial meditative space where many visitors aim to clear the clutter of their lives, get lost in its immensity, and find themselves.
Under this glass-box-and-concrete structure lies Dom Bosco’s Royal Urn, containing the saint’s right arm and visible through a glass frame on the marble floor as you approach the altar along the center aisle. This, designed for the faithful to see the saint and to be seen by him, as do the pilgrims in Dom Bosco’s native Italy where they are said to go seeking in him an encounter with “a father, a teacher, a friend.” Dom Bosco’s right arm is significant because that is the arm used to bless, reconcile, and lead millions of children around the world out of ignorance and poverty through education, says the Catholic church; it is work for which he is recognized the world over and for which he was canonized as a saint.
Bronze reliefs by artist Gianfranco Cerri at the doors, and the crucified Christ by Santa Catarina sculptor
Gotfredo Thaler complete the geometrical sanctuary. At night, it is illuminated by a single chandelier made of 7400 Murano glass pieces from Venice, giving it what some claim is an otherworldly dimension.
The sanctuary is the largest spiritual monument in honor of Dom Bosco in the capital district. Along with others around Brasilia, it forms the thread that binds the capital city, holds it, and gives it its spiritual soul. For Brasilia, the sanctuary is its light and heart, a monument to its destiny, and a guide to the mission of Brazil itself.
IF YOU GO: Santuário São João Bosco is located near the city’s Monumental Axis, within walking distance from the Patio Brasilia Mall. It is open daily from 7 am to 9 pm.
Free.
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