Anthony MURPHY

Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1956 Anthony Murphy has lived and worked near Carcassonne, France since 1992. He attended Westminster School in London and during his teenage years enjoyed success as an actor, receiving an Emmy award for his performance in ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays’. The artist then went on to become a lawyer working in both Britain and France before becoming a painter full time, exhibiting on a regular basis over the last twenty years.

“Anthony Murphy has led the most varied of lives; he was a successful actor while still at school and subsequently qualified as a barrister. But the strain of artistic talent runs strongly in his family, so it was natural for him to decide to express this. Murphy, either consciously or not, fits into the Irish and indeed the Anglo-Irish tradition. He is interested in people and their activities. He is interested in places. There is an element of toughness in his approach. He eschews the conventionally pretty. He is interested rather in structure and in the definition of form. Living near Carcassonne, he responds to the warmth of the south, to the very Frenchness of France: its pollarded trees and waving shutters; its age and yet its timelessness; the churches round which gnarled villages cluster, the bridges that so often imply why these were settled in the first place. The British have drawn and painted in France since the eighteenth century. But France is so varied that there is always something new to explore, something different to express. Murphy has both the intellectual astringency and the technical gift to do so.” - Francis Russell, Deputy Chairman of Christie’s London and their former Old Masters Director.

“Trial and error are my great masters. A painting is nothing more or less than a series of brush strokes; and of each stroke one may say: If you like it, leave it; if you don’t, wipe it off. In my search for colours that move, much of a picture will end up as rags around my feet. Why some people are painters seems partly to do with this persistent desire to correct and alter the image. This persistence and tenacity can suggest that the completed image exists somewhere already, in the way Plato proposed. In fact a quiet hope of mine is to discover, on death, that the heavenly substance from which, say, all pears draw their “pearness”, looks a bit like one of my paintings.” - Anthony Murphy