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We live in and relate to a visual world. With the freedom of distortion, I use elements of the visual world not only as an appreciation of that world, but also as vehicles to express my inner feelings that are emotional, psychological, and abstract. Because of our strong relationships to that which is visual, these vehicles can be doors through which the viewer can enter into the work.
I have strong feelings that all the elements of color, shape, and brushstrokes must have an interaction with each other; that the elements of a painting must have a lasting sense of a vital, sensual, merging, and pulsating energy - an energy that can give the viewer of the work a consciousness of the passion and feelings that were spent in its creation. If the elements in a composition have their energy separated from each other then the painting is dead, and if the painting is without a passion that is permeated into the work, what you will have is only a decoration.
Through the excitement of the painting process there is that search for an insight into the intuitive drive that seeks to give feelings, graphic form, and structure. Because of the unique fluidity of oil paint, it is a natural way to give a vital living skin to the work’s surface that I feel is so very important to the painting process. That living skin can enhance and give vibrancy to new work, as the living skins of old paintings have given us a sense of life and vibrancy to works of certain painters from the past.
~Christus Murphy
