John Murray - Reflections on an Ancient Land

Current Exhibitions

6 Mar

Written By Issy Le B

John Murray

Reflections on an Ancient Land

13 March – 5 April 2025

Art Atrium 48 is pleased to present John Murray’s exhibition, Reflections on an Ancient Land, a compelling series that reflects the artist’s meditative dialogue with the landscape, where one transcends beyond the self to explore nature through an ‘extrospective’ lens.

This body of work marks a significant evolution in John Murray’s practice, embracing the immediacy and fluidity of plein air painting to foster a more direct and intuitive connection with the landscape. Through this approach, he refines his visual language, distilling nature’s complexity into its most essential and resonant forms. Each work unfolds organically, capturing a landscape that is not only observed but deeply experienced.

John Murray has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the College of Fine Art, University of NSW (2000), an Associate Diploma of Fine Art from TAFE, and is a graduate of Printmaking and Education from Southern Cross University. He was the winner of the Wynne Prize Trustees’ Watercolour award for landscape painting at Art Gallery of NSW in 2017, a Finalist of NSW Plein Air Painting Prize, a Finalist of Paddington Art Prize in 2016 and Finalist of the Warringah Council Art Prize in 2015 and 2023. John Murray also has a ceramic-art practice and has been an illustrator for various magazines and journals.

“My work is concerned with observation. It is an attendance to the beauty of the natural surroundings where I choose to work. I try to paint without concern for time, or for the difficulty involved in depicting what I see before me. A work is finished when I have nothing left to add.

Art is a parallel world. It is a world of the imagination and the senses, and for this it is as important as anything that we can create. This is to understand that a painting of a tree is not a tree. I know a painted tree cannot photosynthesise or provide the ecological role of the real tree before me. But the painted tree furnishes an internal world and lives in the painting. This is in the nature of art. It speaks in its own way and lives in its own space.

If I were to add to this with a brief summary of the way that I hope my own art speaks ... I aim to convey the idea that art can enrich our understandings and our lives without consuming the life force of the planet, and without diminishing its health and resources. I aim to create art that respects the natural world as a student respects their teacher and directs us to seek our answers there. In this sense I repudiate a materialist-individualist notion of ‘being-in-the-world’, and its attendant politics that deify human extraction and accumulation.

I hope that it is apparent here that I use art-making as a method to see, to be quiet and to be patient. It takes a long time to finish a painting and I try to put a lot of information into each picture so you too have the opportunity to see, to be quiet and to be patient and that the picture will keep giving if you also keep giving. I use the art-creation process as a way to search beyond the horizon of my ignorance for something that if it is depicted and described well, then even this depiction can open new possibilities of understanding - both for me, while I was observing and for a viewer in my description. In this sense we are talking about seeing, feeling, and understanding, or to phrase it differently, learning, expressing and knowing. And I can say this for a certainty: having painted these works I know more than I did before I started them! And I hope there is a learning journey in here for others too.”