ABOUT

Joanna Murphy paints a world of spectacular seascapes, golden dunes, atmospheric landscapes, lit and shadowed forests, and city vistas along the East River near her home in downtown Manhattan.

She paints the architectural forms within rural, urban and coastal environments as they experience the effects of a changing world. But it is the white light of the Cape where she has found enduring inspiration and camaraderie of the community of painters over the length of her career. When she finished her studies at the Swain School of Design, Murphy undertook her own art journey, traveling from painting to painting across Europe.

She intended to settle in Paris, but after awhile, she realized that what had always inspired her was America, the land, the music, the people, the culture, and she came home again. Later, in Provincetown, Murphy was introduced to the theories of Henry Henshe and the interpretation of notes of color as revealed in varying light. Light and color are the essential elements of Murphy's language.

Murphy has always been a landscape painter, from her earliest days at Swain. Over the ensuing years, she has brought to the plein-air tradition an increasingly expressionist brushwork and nearly abstract distillation in composition, ordering horizon, sky and land to their essential forms, creating paintings of dynamic color and rhythmic structure. The core of her work is not merely a depiction of nature manifested in the process of painting...