1. Early life, education and career

2. Artistic practice

3. Collections

4. References

Murphy lives and works in Poughkeepsie, New York. She is married to artist Harry Roseman.^[4][5]

Early life, education and career

As a young girl, Catherine Murphy was always drawn to making art. In the third grade, her teacher allowed her to paint, paste and also draw on the blackboard in the back of the classroom.^[5] In interviews she recounts a moment in church when she was about 12. A visiting cardinal asked the children of the congregation if anyone had a vocation. Young Catherine raised her hand and said, "I'm going to be an artist when I grow up."^[6]

Growing up in Lexington, Massachusetts, Murphy had little exposure to art and visited an art museum for the first time during high school. In interviews Murphy often mentions how drawing and painting were a means to seek control over her world.^[7] Murphy studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Pratt Institute in 1967, where she was later awarded an honorary doctorate degree in 2006.^[3]

Artistic practice

Murphy's drawings, prints and oil paintings, created solely through direct observation, are highly detailed depictions of people, objects and spaces. Using natural light, her meticulously composed setups are often rendered at a scale larger than the original subject. One painting can take several years to complete.^[5] Murphy has said of her work that she is trying to "slow things down" in her paintings,^[6] that "my paintings are not about that one moment of seeing. My paintings are about time passing. Time is depicted in a very different way than most people even think about time- which is cinematically, and through the camera's eye."^[5]

With regard to the formal qualities of her work, Hilton Kramer wrote in 1975 that Murphy, not yet 30 years old, was in possession of a "firm pictorial mind", exhibiting a profound awareness of Modernism and Cubism while carrying "the realist impulse into a terrain all her own".^[8]

Collections

Catherine Murphy's drawings, lithographs and oil paintings are in the following collections.

• The Art Institute of Chicago
• Cranbrook Art Museum
• The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
• The Maxine & Stuart Frankel Foundation for Art
• The Frye Art Museum
• The Georgia Museum of Art
• The Greenville County Museum of Art
• The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
• The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College
• The Louis-Dreyfus Family Collection
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art
• The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
• The Museum of Modern Art
• The Newark Museum
• The New Jersey State Museum
• The New York Public Library
• The Phillips Collection
• The Smithsonian American Art Museum
• The University of Michigan^[3]

References

• Valsamma
• Val Sanderson
• Valsanesti
• Valsan Koorma Kolleri
• Valsan River
• Val Sarentino
• Valsartan/amlodipine
• Valsayn Campus
• Val Schneider
• Val-Sci
• ValSci
• Val-sci
• Valscian language
• Val (sculptor)
• Val Secchia
• Valse-Fantaisie
• Valsella Meccanotecnica
• Val Senales
• Valser Rhine
• Valsertal
• Valser Tal, South Tyrol
• Valser Tal (South Tyrol)
• Valse-Scherzo (Tchaikovsky)
• Valsesian Autonomist Movement
• Valses nobles et sentimentales (Schubert)