Nina Murdoch Overview

Although she never identifies it in the titles of her paintings, Nina Murdoch constantly returns to a mysterious, shadowy place in Battersea. Here, gazing at a road dominated by heavy bridges and the insistent din of unseen London traffic, she finds... [more]

Although she never identifies it in the titles of her paintings, Nina Murdoch constantly returns to a mysterious, shadowy place in Battersea. Here, gazing at a road dominated by heavy bridges and the insistent din of unseen London traffic, she finds herself mesmerised. Street kids who hang out in this grimy locale look at her uneasily, suspecting that she might be an undercover police officer. But Murdoch does not feel threatened. She is, after all, a Londoner from birth, and feels profoundly attached to the city’s history. And the ever-shifting light means that, each time she revisits her Battersea haunt, it looks different. This unpredictability lies at the centre of her involvement with a place many people might well find unprepossessing or frankly ominous. Even so, Murdoch is not a topographical artist. Spurning all thought of illustration, she concentrates instead on the authenticity of her emotional response to the scene. When asleep, she often feels that whole cities fill her head with their inexhaustible urban complexity. And in the studio, where Murdoch habitually works at night, she prefers to work fast – painting over what she has done before and refusing to think too much about fidelity to the outward appearance of her chosen setting. Her decision to work in egg on gesso panels might suggest a technical obsession with archaic techniques perfected as long ago as the fifteenth century. But it would be a mistake to conclude that Murdoch is an artist preoccupied with the past. While admiring Uccello’s perpetual play with perspectival space and the rhythmic patterns running through it, she thrives on a heretical attitude to working methods. Making it up rather than relying on rules of any kind, she favours unusually large brushes, an abundance of water and a liberal use of sandpaper. [show less]