JIM MURRAY: THE SUMMITS IN WINTER
By Peter Frank
John Muir, the naturalist, helped create Yosemite National Park – securing the site’s extraordinary life and topography against human exploitation. A century and a quarter later, Jim Murray, the naturalist, has helped re-create Yosemite Nation Park – regarding and replicating the moods and atmosphere of its highest points. The “naturalism” of one J.M., of course, is not that of the other. But they both spring from a love of nature’s grandeur, and in particular from an abiding awe in those climactic Yosemite moments where the ground touches the sky.
Muir was the visionary; Murray concerns himself with vision, with what can be seen, and what the eye takes away. If Muir’s naturalism was a social matter, Murray’s is an optical one, not simply reifying but clarifying the conditions of light and substance. Engaging various practices associated historically with landscape painting, from plein air notation to photographic capture, Murray seeks not so much to turn the artistic clock back two centuries (or more) as to investigate what remains vital about such practices.
What can Murray’s hand do that a picture postcard can’t? What can his pen, his brush, or even his camera do that a cellphone or web cam can’t? In fact, such rhetorical questions motivate Murray less than does the simple and timeless challenge of getting the hand to describe what the eye and mind see. But if issues of old-media-versus-new don’t freight what Murray does and how he does it, they nag at our apprehension of his method, and he knows it. He is no naïf, after all, and he does not work much less exhibit, in a vacuum.
Murray’s most overt address to matters of latter-day imaging is the sequence of paintings (ongoing, like all series discussed here) he derives not from direct observation of the subject, but observation once removed – observation of observation, if you will. In his Yosemite Cam Series Murray paints what he sees in from of him, not in the park itself but on his computer screen hundreds of miles away. His decisions are impulsive rather than measured (“…I download the web images that I find visually engaging or ones that connect to my past experiences in the park…”) but are still framed by the algorithmic rather than emotional provisions of the program training its web cam on the Yosemite Valley. Murray leaves in the data strips in the pictures’ corners, but suppresses the data itself, thus lifting each image out of the moment while leaving it in the early digital era – a sly compromise of the 19th century look and feel pervading Murray’s approach.
The series of paintings and drawings Yosemite on Site, on the other hand, places Murray front and center in and before Yosemite’s natural wonders, and capitalizes on his ability to work like a German romantic or American luminist. Here he works from direct observation; his renderings and not wild and instantaneous in their feeling like Turner or even Constable, but deliberate and structurally sensitive, with minute attention paid to light and surface. Winter in Yosemite is famously gentle as winters go, allowing plein air practitioner to lavish attention on the mountains’ glinting majesties; still, Murray, in his words, leaves these works intentionally “in progress, a visual notation of both place and process.”
Murray saves his “finishing touches” for the works in his Yosemite Studio Series, the most normative, but still most elaborate, pictures in his paintings of the park’s peaks. The views offer more breadth, the mountains’ crags are that much more modeled, even the skies, elsewhere abstracted, take on distinctive personalities. “This incorporation of the more academic side of image-making,” notes Murray, “is a personal connection… necessary to retain many of the core considerations that I have continually addressed in my work over the past four decades.”
Like any artist – and especially and “realist” – working in the early 21st century, Jim Murray must consider what he does from a number of angles. His engagement with veristic representation is no mere display of virtuosity, any more than his dogged and enduring focus on Yosemite in some mad idée fixe. But nor is it an ideological stand against current technology or even current artist practice. Murray certainly takes in contemporary ideas, radical and conservative, about art-making and picture-making. He reacts, however, not to quotidian art-world distractions, but to the timeless verities posed by some of the world’s largest, least animate objects. Los Angeles June 2014
By Peter Frank
John Muir, the naturalist, helped create Yosemite National Park – securing the site’s extraordinary life and topography against human exploitation. A century and a quarter later, Jim Murray, the naturalist, has helped re-create Yosemite Nation Park – regarding and replicating the moods and atmosphere of its highest points. The “naturalism” of one J.M., of course, is not that of the other. But they both spring from a love of nature’s grandeur, and in particular from an abiding awe in those climactic Yosemite moments where the ground touches the sky.
Muir was the visionary; Murray concerns himself with vision, with what can be seen, and what the eye takes away. If Muir’s naturalism was a social matter, Murray’s is an optical one, not simply reifying but clarifying the conditions of light and substance. Engaging various practices associated historically with landscape painting, from plein air notation to photographic capture, Murray seeks not so much to turn the artistic clock back two centuries (or more) as to investigate what remains vital about such practices.
What can Murray’s hand do that a picture postcard can’t? What can his pen, his brush, or even his camera do that a cellphone or web cam can’t? In fact, such rhetorical questions motivate Murray less than does the simple and timeless challenge of getting the hand to describe what the eye and mind see. But if issues of old-media-versus-new don’t freight what Murray does and how he does it, they nag at our apprehension of his method, and he knows it. He is no naïf, after all, and he does not work much less exhibit, in a vacuum.
Murray’s most overt address to matters of latter-day imaging is the sequence of paintings (ongoing, like all series discussed here) he derives not from direct observation of the subject, but observation once removed – observation of observation, if you will. In his Yosemite Cam Series Murray paints what he sees in from of him, not in the park itself but on his computer screen hundreds of miles away. His decisions are impulsive rather than measured (“…I download the web images that I find visually engaging or ones that connect to my past experiences in the park…”) but are still framed by the algorithmic rather than emotional provisions of the program training its web cam on the Yosemite Valley. Murray leaves in the data strips in the pictures’ corners, but suppresses the data itself, thus lifting each image out of the moment while leaving it in the early digital era – a sly compromise of the 19th century look and feel pervading Murray’s approach.
The series of paintings and drawings Yosemite on Site, on the other hand, places Murray front and center in and before Yosemite’s natural wonders, and capitalizes on his ability to work like a German romantic or American luminist. Here he works from direct observation; his renderings and not wild and instantaneous in their feeling like Turner or even Constable, but deliberate and structurally sensitive, with minute attention paid to light and surface. Winter in Yosemite is famously gentle as winters go, allowing plein air practitioner to lavish attention on the mountains’ glinting majesties; still, Murray, in his words, leaves these works intentionally “in progress, a visual notation of both place and process.”
Murray saves his “finishing touches” for the works in his Yosemite Studio Series, the most normative, but still most elaborate, pictures in his paintings of the park’s peaks. The views offer more breadth, the mountains’ crags are that much more modeled, even the skies, elsewhere abstracted, take on distinctive personalities. “This incorporation of the more academic side of image-making,” notes Murray, “is a personal connection… necessary to retain many of the core considerations that I have continually addressed in my work over the past four decades.”
Like any artist – and especially and “realist” – working in the early 21st century, Jim Murray must consider what he does from a number of angles. His engagement with veristic representation is no mere display of virtuosity, any more than his dogged and enduring focus on Yosemite in some mad idée fixe. But nor is it an ideological stand against current technology or even current artist practice. Murray certainly takes in contemporary ideas, radical and conservative, about art-making and picture-making. He reacts, however, not to quotidian art-world distractions, but to the timeless verities posed by some of the world’s largest, least animate objects. Los Angeles June 2014