Wil Murray: the strange space that will keep us together

At the Belkin Satellite Art Gallery, Vancouver

8 March to 6 April 2008

Wil Murray, Casual Friday Morning Coming Down, 2007. Image: belkin.ubc.ca

We’ve got to say it: VoCA loves Wil Murray’s paintings!

A novel mix between painting, sculpture and collage, with echoes of Jessica Stockholder, James Rosenquist and Rauschenberg, they’re not gimmicky. If vision could equal sound, this might be it.

According to the exhibition press release, “Murray’s work explores the horrors of banal choices. In every choice, there is an element of madness. The most reasoned decision is still a leap of faith into an unknowable future- a leap which is never made alone, as its consequences ripple out. Paint is poured onto a support, slowly built up layer by layer, sections are cut out and tacked onto other works…A story is told, but the tale is not straightforward.”

Murray was born and raised in Calgary, Alberta. He attended the Alberta College of Art + Design for two years before moving to Vancouver to open a studio. Now based in Montreal, Murray was short-listed for the RBC Painting Competition (2005) and was included in the Magenta Foundation’s Carte Blanche Vol. 2: Painting (2007).

Wil Murray is represented by the Patrick Mikhail Gallery in Ottawa.

VoCA caught up with him by email…

Wil Murray, Hey Girl You’re Ruthless Now So Am I Hey Hey, 2006. Image: wilmurray.com

VoCA: It must be a challenge for painters to create something new with paint and canvas – artists have been using those materials for centuries. How do you reconcile the limitations of painting with the need to be creative?

WIL MURRAY: The other night I was describing to some friends how when I look directly at the large questions of painting like this one, I feel like I’ve gone blind, or that there is simply nothing there to see. A book called “Looking Awry” about Lacan was mentioned, as was a constellation of stars that you can really only see when you look just next to where it is in the sky.

That said, I’m not sure what limitations you mean. Maybe I am kind of dull, but I find painting so staggeringly difficult that I don’t think I will find limitations. Early explorations in other mediums weren’t nearly as difficult to me, partly because I am very comfortable being the dandy. In the case of those early expeditions into installation or performance, I was the art piece and that was not nearly as satisfying to the corollary I pursued on the weekends in the form of getting fucked up and throwing bottles into crowds at bars.

Other mediums felt easy because I aimed for immediate effect and got immediate response. It wasn’t nearly as terrifying as painting. I was noticeable, but kind of lame. Painting requires me to work on something that will be, more than I am, the thing to be admired, interpreted and digested or ignored. It’s permanence and demands on my and the viewers’ time thwarts a very contemporary and ravenous relationship to my quickly establishing a public identity for myself; where the ends are sought quickly and the means invented afterward.

I can’t so easily stake a claim to anything with painting, but can speak simultaneously about many things.

Jessica Stockholder, #291, 1997. Image: virginia.edu

VoCA: How did your current work come about? What was the inspiration behind this work?

W.M: My most recent work is a bit of a secret, but the work before that was a kind of step to the side of what I was working on before I made it. I had to switch materials from industrial polyurethanes to industrial acrylics in 2005 because I was getting sickeningly high in the studio every day and killing myself with fumes.

After that switch I moved more and more into artist’s acrylics, a material I never really had worked with before. All of a sudden I had tubes of paint in the studio and some brushes too, so they suggested I could, if I bought a beret and pallet, start rendering illusionistic form with brush and paint.

At the same time, I had come back around to spray foam and paint skins as a way to build physical volume. As I worked outward toward the viewer, got more interested in working inward into plastic space. I was delighted to find I was terrible painter with brush and paint, as this allowed all my other processes to match the speed of my development of those techniques.

Robert Rauschenberg, Pilgrim, 1950. Image: artnet.com

It also began to dawn on me that accident was being washed away from my work more and more, any claim to it being a part of what I was doing was in bad faith. Sure liquid paint goes places you don’t expect, but when you compose a paint skin on glass, prepare it, apply it and fill it with spray foam, that is rather intentional. I’m still struggling with accident leaving my work.

VoCA: When I look at your work – I get echoes of Jessica Stockholder and Robert Rauschenberg. What artists have you been influenced by? Which do you particularly admire?

W.M: I don’t know Stockholder, but in regard to Rauschenberg…With a recent piece, I was trying to figure out how I would wind up deciding to place a bucket in my work, like Rauschenberg. Staring at the paint covered buckets in the corner of my studio, wondering how far they were from being included.

I am still too obsessed by a kind of pop relationship to my own works that the re-attachment of my paint skins allows, but that bucket pile gets bigger and livelier all the time. And then I couldn’t remember if Rauschenberg ever had a bucket in his paintings. I’ve never actually seen a Rauschenberg in person, but there is a magazine ad from the 70s that I sent a friend where he’s kind wearing flowing white clothes, and sitting in front of some terrible mirrored, gold veiny multiples you can order. That is a huge influence.

I admire James Rosenquist a lot. And I love my imagined Frank Stella. I saw very good paintings by Daniel Langevin recently that I think I might have made if I had never done drugs. Oh, and Chris Millar, he has been an inspiration since school. And Dave & Jenn, they and Chris and some other Calgary painters will be in a group show I am curating for the Sled island festival in Calgary this summer.

Stubbs’ “Lion Attacking a Horse” is my favourite painting of all time.

James Rosenquist, Nomad, 1963. Image: albrightknox.org

VoCA: How important is sculpture to your work? Collage?

W.M: I find how sculpture is out on the floor, to be walked around a little daunting and hard to look at. Painting stills holds the most secrets for me because of that one surface with its back to the wall. That holds so much mystery and magic.

Collage might be my biggest secret love. Mainly because collage is hilarious, the possibility for puns is huge. I used to sit up on crystal meth all night making obsessive collages out of magazines. Postcards that I still have that are so tight and strange. I’m sure they led into what I am doing now with collaging my own marks. Sometimes I think that that Motherwell “cigarette pack and black splash of paint” piece is what I am trying to make most of the time. That piece is so iconic.

George Stubbs, A Lion Attacking a Horse (Circa 1765). Image: ngv.vic.gov.au

VoCA: Your works seem playful experiments in colour and shape. Just curious: Are they at all related to music?

W.M: Well, I am a more developed music fan than a painting one, as I have probably shown in this interview. I listen to music in the studio all the time, but I really hate art that is a translation of one medium to another, so I won’t even allude to that being the case.

I’m hitting a wall right now, discovering that while I was so long steeped in music- a popular medium - I am participating and loving in one much more elitist. I have wonderful cross-medium conversations with musician friends. Music is so much more social, I play in a band and it is a relief from the solitude of painting, but I just can’t get hooked on it as much.

Robert Motherwell, St Michael III, 1979. Image: cs.nga.gov.au