Strong light, a garden, a parrot, bird food for a thousand sparrows, the studio, a lot of paintings turned to the wall, one is turned out to face me and I see an image full of rush and space, a conversation starts up. Phrases and words seem just like the paintings.
Breakthrough - working back to white -
Working in negative and positive all the time, losing and finding - some of it really is working in the dark -
Setting up a whole way of paintings where I can't possibly repeat myself - relying on the accidents to make it work and keeping all the balls in the air until the last minute -
Basically I put stuff down to work against -
Put on a mark and then cut back -
What takes the time is finding those patterns, making space work, where the light comes out - not just 'ooh colour!'
Nina Murdoch doesn't say anything pretentious and doesn't' use jargon; it's a shock: somebody normal! In art circles you don't often come across anyone like that. She is known for urban scenes with a lot of striking dramatic perspective.
When I was a student, on a bus, I didn't know what I was doing, and I saw the train lines and I thought, 'Wow, this is what I want to do.' That's the hardest think, to find out what you want to do.
Her paintings have changed recently, become more subtle, so you feel the emotion is more in the painting than the picture, how it's done rather than what it is - the movement of the paint, the play of colours and light - the sense of something real and concrete but at the same time constantly melting and reforming. She works on wood panels that have been expertly gessoed. She uses powdered pigment bound with egg tempera. She uses the colour more of less pure. She creates forms and then she puts darker colours over the initial ones so the forms disappear, and then she sands down the darker areas to find the forms again - they're always different of course. Then she puts on more colours, finds more forms, and so on - the process takes a long time. As ever with her work, she sees something that moves her, an effect of light, the city changed by light, and she absorbs that and then tries through various means to picture it or find a visual metaphor for it. But now the paintings aren't scenes so much as scene fragments.
Working in the life room with Euan Uglow at the Slade gave me a structure. I felt lost after school and I felt found at art school. He taught me colour and light, how they react to each other, how a colour changes because of the colour it's next to. He taught me about visual experience. Bernard Cohen was equally important. He told me to get out of the life room. Euan taught me hot to look. Bernard taught me to sometimes not finish things, to leave them and move on.
She worked behind a plastic curtain at the R. A. because she couldn't bear to be exposed. The R.A. introduced her to tempera.
With oil I was self-conscious, aware of technique, but this way of working keeps the process exciting. As soon as you know what you're doing too much technically it's boring. I invented this way of painting in order to not have to think about painting.
What are the most important things?
The visual. Light. The city.
She wrote her art school thesis on cities; she dreams of cities constantly.
My mother and her mother and myself, we all dreamed of cities: houses, spaces, history - the city is a framework. But I'm not representing a city now.
I'm finding details, finding excuses to paint. I saw a blue light at the bottom of a bridge, then the sun came through a crack in the bridget, and the orange and the blue was such an increadible thing to see - I got it in a painting - all the time I'm looking for such things. I write everything down - keep a diary - visual notes and thoughts.
I always pretty much painted like this, the urban landscape, done by eye with washy transparent paint. But the work is changing now in the direction of - I hope - being more adventurous. I mean in terms of ability to paint - relying less on perspective and build structures, and more on light and a sense of space - not on such obvious structures - I'm beginning to make it much harder for myself.
I used to paint whole cities but now I think of these paintings as fragments of light - you know, the micro and macro - the amazing quality of light - its sculptural effect - the way it divides up the world dramatically. How far can I push it - almost dissolving a real space?
The panels are smooth before she works on them. The surface is like marble. When they're finished, they look polished but if you feel them they're rough in places. They actually have a lot of texture. She exploits the grittiness that some of the pigments have, especially yellow and red oxide.
The colours are pure but hidden and then you need to go back to them find them, vaguely remembering they're there, or having a precise memory or hoping for the best. You find them in accidental shapes, you bring them out, their purity is there but the shape is accidental, based on wiping and sanding. Then gradually the whole thing comes together like a huge jigsaw, but a flowing form, not patchwork. It's very important in the process of working that things really do need to get covered over, to disappear. It's almost like a squirrel hiding nuts.
It's figurative work but permeated with abstract values. The white ground is key. It's always glowing through, and that inner glow is almost the main material she works with, along with a sense of a place.
The earlier work was much more about perspective and about the buildings themselves. The movement has been away from building towards studying light and colour more. The paintings are the nearest thing I can do to expressing my feelings, the nearest I can get to what's in my head. I always felt I was on my own doing my own thing. I never felt I fitted in. But I see other artists who are like that too. I can't claim to be trying to be anything - I'm just learning how to express myself.