Murray's World
by Tracey O'Shaughnessy,
associate features editor, Waterbury Republican-American
Life comes at us fast and furious, so that most of us are left with snapshots that form a house of cards.
Virginia Murray understood that. A splendid posthumous exhibit at the Good News Cafe in Woodbury illustrates just how well she did.
Murray, who died last year at 89, began studying at the Art Students League in New York in her late teens. Her life and her art are splendid examples, not only of her genuine mastery of cubish and abstraction, but the remarkable sacrifices and ingenuity required of a talented artist and mother.
Murray was born in 1916 and grew up in New York City. She had what appears to have been a charmed early life, attending Concord Academy in Massachusetts while her brother attended Harvard. When the stock market collapsed, so did Murray's scholastic career. Left with enough funds to send only one child to private school, Murray's parents sensibly chose to keep her brother at Harvard, career options for women being limited and financially unrewarding. Her mother, however, wisely saw her daughter's aesthetic sense and suggested she enroll at the Art Students League, where tuition was only $30 a month. She entered the school at 17 and appeared to flourish, studying with Morris Kantor and George Gross, William Zorach and Jose DeKreeft.
The need for income led her to fashion, where she became an apprentice with dress designer Elizabeth Hawes. But the advent of World War II made dress design seem frivolous and indulgent, and Murray sought a job that had a practical application. She picked mechanical drafting, which got her a job in the Engineering Department at Edo Aircraft, where she met her future husband Gardner Murray.
She became pregnant quickly, left her job, and eventually raised six children.
She painted while her children napped.
The retrospective exhibit at Good News emphasizes Murray's extraordinary range as a painter and ceramicist. Murray paints with an extraordinary love of form and texture, treating objects with an almost religious reverence. Indeed, a sense of the sacred, as well as a wry insight into the juxtapositions of modernity and antiquity, run throughout her work.
Her painting of the center of Woodbury, done early in her career, is rich with the flat planes and contours that animate her best work. But it also possesses a sinster undercurrent, as if this archetypal New England community throbs with an ancient mysticism, reminiscent of Rockwell Kent.
Other works, like her breath-taking treatment of a barn, demonstrate Murray's brilliant compositional insight. Here, the planes of the barn fold over and into one another like a paper doll. The white wood X's on the side of the barn door seem talismanic, and the central black panel seems to conceal a menacing maw capable of swallowing up the curious.
The paintings blend beautifully with the exquisite ceramics on display. Murray only began in ceramics when she was 70 but they are full of the sculptural elements and motifs that make her best work sing. Animals have a friendly majesty and forms are celebrated for their inherent grace.
Murray is obviously deeply respectful of ancient religions and cultures and her wonderful still lifes are rife with contradictions and juxtapositions. Coke cans nestle against wine bottles and plastic mustard squeeze bottles, while nearby, arches and pilaster frame the Italian countryside.
Murray is at her best in these cubist, abstract works. Her interest in more florid, wispy vegetation is not nearly carried off as well.
But perhaps most poignant are her images of children, together or alone. Here, children are both individuals and archetypes, tender and solicitous of each other, and deeply, intriguingly independent. This is a mother, and an artist, who treated life with the reverence it merits.
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