Oil Paintings

Joanna Murphy is a recent addition to our stable of outstanding visual artists. She was featured in her first solo exhibit October, 2020, through February, 2021. A selection of paintings available through the gallery is shown below. For these works, prices range from $1,250 to $3,200.

Joanna Murphy sees her surroundings through the medium of paint. Her landscape paintings bear subtle connections to the Romanticism of the Hudson River School and the gestural painting of the New York Abstract Expressionists. She is inspired by land, nature, and poetry. Murphy's work balances elements of realism and dreamlike abstraction. Bold compositional rhythms are richly colored and uninterrupted. The oil paintings are queer, abstract, and intimate scenes - from the roof of her lower east side neighborhood and around her transcendentalist studio in the Catskills Mountains.

Her paintings mostly exclude actual human presence. However, in the strange shadows, dark spaces, and areas of light in windows, roofs and at the edges of the forest, are suggested an intangible - yet human - experience of life. It is a "you" that dissolves into a rhythm of the paint. With these elements, Murphy's paintings inspire a perception and understanding of her (and by extension, our) environment.

(Artist narrative continues after images.)

Please click on an image below to display a larger version above. Paintings shown in first grouping are on exhibit at the gallery. LARGER PHOTOS of all work shown are available by request. Any work sold is marked SOLD.

Paintings below may stll be available for view and purchase in our holdings gallery.

Murphy is an alumnus of the Swain School of Design in New Bedford, MA. She was influenced at Swain by painter and teacher, David L. Smith, who was a student of abstract expressionist Hans Hoffman. Murphy also studied with Henry Hensche in Provincetown, MA. Hensche instilled in his students a profound appreciation for the beauty of nature's light and color. (Hensche studied with George Bellows, Charles Hawthorne and at the Cape Cod School of Art.) Murphy was awarded a grant from the Gottlieb Foundation and received an Artist Residency at the Vermont Studio Center in Manchester, VT. Her landscape murals are featured in several of the towns and private homes in the Catskill Mountains.