Joel Murray Makes Up HIs Mind

Joel Murray, a Dallas-based artist whose show opens on July 8th, shares his thoughts with Patron Magazine in this exclusive interview. Murray’s paintings straddle the worlds of the real and the surreal, and the personal and the universal. Murray will show new work alongside Sean Cairns in an exhibition titled Everyday Magic, Everyday Music at Gallery 12.26. 

Here, Murray shares fascinating insights into his creative process and explains how personal experiences and societal issues shape his narrative abstractions. The conversation delves into the metaphoric depths of his work, revealing the existential themes and striking use of color that characterize his style. It also sheds light on Murray’s relationship with his medium, the act of painting itself, and how it serves as a tool for exploring reality and unreality. As Murray opens up about his sources of inspiration, both past and present, we get a clearer picture of how he navigates the interplay between personal narrative and abstract interpretation in his art.

PATRON: How do you choose which personal experiences to incorporate into your paintings? For example, where did the inspiration come from in Chinese-American Conglomerate Missing Person?  

JM: That image came from thinking about the hierarchy of stories as they are presented to the consumer on news media websites. I looked at the sequencing of one online news outlet – first the site presented a longer, more involved story about the forming of a Chinese and American business merger/conglomerate, then a story about Syrian refugees, and finally a short piece about a missing person. 

I was thinking about the act of skimming or quickly scrolling through business deals and tragedy, and how I wanted to use drawing as a way to fix those images and combine them to appear clear and collaged. Also, my interest in art history, specifically Caravaggio’s jam-packed figurative paintings that are filled with high drama, bled into that specific drawing. News as a harrowing experience, theatre, and entertainment made me think of Caravaggio, most likely.

P: Please elaborate on the concept of “death avoidance” as portrayed in your works?

JM: Absolutely! I should answer such a question with real enthusiasm. A joie de vivre! Much of my research has centered around death or fear of death and as I learned more about the different ways these inevitabilities impact all of us, I began to understand that painting, for me, is a joyful and incredibly challenging form of death avoidance. Painting is life affirming for me. I suppose there are some examples of this throughout my paintings – flowers that look like human silhouettes floating through spiraling color fields, paintings with void spaces, figures that are sleeping, resting or dreaming… 

P: Is there a specific instance where a peculiar personal experience significantly influenced one of your paintings for this upcoming exhibition?

JM: My wife and I visited a strip mall spa and massage joint. Gregorian chants (the Muzak version) played in the background as we both nervously awaited our moderately priced massage. Red light changes the value of each wall. Lying face down, only ten or so minutes into what seemed like a primarily and unexpectedly butt-focused massage, I was jolted by a loud ringing. It was the landline. My masseuse picked up the phone with one hand and began making eventual appointments as she kneaded my calf muscle with her spare hand. The spare hand delivered more erratic pats, like she was tussling my leg hair, consoling it. In the middle of a loud appointment confirmation, a high-pitched, hyena-like laughter began. The almost cartoon laughing fit went on for several minutes. My face is wedged in a sofa hole and it’s so dark even with my eyes open I can’t see any of what has just happened. Then the noises stopped. Silence. The masseuse apologized for the loud neighbor, we paid, and left. I knew this moment was a painting. Or, the beginning of several.

P: How do you balance the desire to express your personal narrative while maintaining a degree of abstraction that allows for multiple interpretations?

JM: I am like a sieve. If I am not careful, my response to my personal narrative can be too literal, reactionary. I have to see a story’s form before I can begin to further articulate it’s underlying meaning. This is fascinating to me because the exhibition at 12.26 will feature abstractions that are more ubiquitous metaphor for closer-to-literal representations in previous paintings. It will be nice for people to see both. 

P: You’ve talked about the existential themes in your work. Are there any artists from history whose exploration of these themes has particularly resonated with you?

JM: Munch, Hopper, and I am a Francis Bacon fanatic. The way Bacon approached the figure in struggle, the depiction of movement, beauty, and violence–he’s an all-timer for me. The Dutch painter Jacqueline de Jong’s animal and human tirades that look like they are distorting time and space; her paintings stick with me. Xinyi Cheng, a contemporary Chinese painter, has recently created some quiet and very powerful paintings that are so intimate, you can feel the ripples of the moment she captured when looking at them. Tomoo Gokita can express so much in so many different styles that still seem to belong to him. And, Gokita’s surfaces are paramount to me. And, too many more to mention here. I look at past and present painting for so many things. And (Robert) Gober. Have to mention him.

P: How do you decide on the unexpected color combinations in your artwork? Do the colors hold specific symbolic meanings?

JM: One way I decide is I often look at how color functions in other historical or contemporary painters’ work, then see if I can use those colors to convey an adjacent mood, or completely different meaning all together. My decision making is sometimes informed and other times intuitive or based off of prior experience using a particular palette, combination. Color can transfix you and hold you in a particular place where you can’t move forward. Sometimes you have to tell yourself “I’m free” then make the fucking move to escape your own terror. I have a difficult relationship with color. We’re working it out.

P: How does the act of painting help you mediate the complexities of reality and unreality, or irreality in particular?

JM: I love this question. I have control over paint in degrees, but what often feels like very little control at the same time. I have only so little control in my reality and how I choose to operate with in its perceived framework. There is all of this mystery that surrounds me that I can’t know. I think the process of painting and thinking about how and what I can translate from any given experience can give me a little more insight into what happened to me. The act of painting can change the story of my life, and I’m fascinated to see how the paintings become similar and different to my experience. It’s a very difficult thing to know. 

There is mystery, guess work, unknowns in so much of my life that maybe painting plays a large role for me in parsing things that I need and don’t need. But I’d like to keep most of it.

Everyday Magic, Everyday Music at Gallery 12.26 runs July 8 through August 5. Gallery1226.com