Erin Murphy

The walls of Erin Murphy’s painting studio read like a picture dictionary sprung to life, with farmyard animals and familiar objects unfolding like fragmentary entries in a tender taxonomy of a happy-go-lucky world. Drawing on a personal library of visual references – eclectic and idiosyncratic images gleaned from scientific volumes and vintage encyclopaedias, nature illustrations and children’s books, open-source archives and the annals of art history – Erin reimagines her collected curiosities in a distinctive painterly style that blends warmly nostalgic storybook whimsy with a dash of pathos and deadpan wit.

“It’s the dry and straightforward nature of these pictures that I find interesting,” says the artist, who has recently completed her master’s at NAS. “The cold indifference is not something we associate with painting, which we expect to be expressive or poetic. By bringing that matter-of-fact imagery into art, a kind of funny awkwardness can arise, and I like that.” Animated by expressive flecks of pointillist, sketched-out brushwork and energetic bursts of warm, lightly faded colour, her playful and big-hearted paintings delight in the strange and quirky humour that emerges from seemingly banal, supposedly objective source material. In playing up this strangeness, Erin taps into a gentle undercurrent of melancholy and other emotional depths belied by her subjects’ outward simplicity.

Whether it stems from the wistfulness of her picture-book style, the folly of our efforts to classify and comprehend the natural world, or the kitsch conventions of animal portraiture – a genre that lays bare our human foibles and sentimental excesses by projecting emotion onto creatures with unknowable inner lives – a quiet poignancy often peeks through her otherwise bright and ebullient scenes.

This bittersweetness is evident even in one of her most lighthearted works, Snowman, which was shortlisted for the Sir John Sulman Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. “It uses an encyclopaedic image that I thought would make a very funny painting,” says Erin, whose Sulman nod is the latest in a string of career triumphs since her star turn as a National Emerging Art Prize (NEAP) finalist. “It’s important to have a sense of humour so I don’t get stuck in my head when I’m painting. I can imagine a kids’ alphabet chart saying: S is for Snowman. It’s like a snowman is a character we’ve all just accepted, rather than a temporary sculpture people make. So, the snowman would be a component of my picture dictionary of the world. I think I’ll paint an igloo for him soon.”

-Harry Roberts for Belle Magazine