Stellarhighway is delighted to present Paintings for the Bird Above My Head by Philadelphia-based artist Henry Murphy. The fifteen paintings in this solo presentation are a byproduct of the artist’s recent excursions, each made en plein air or from memory in the studio. To him, they are symbols of his real life, excerpts meant to be both biographical and universal, and to give credit to the everyday experience. The artist’s work takes inspiration from human interaction with the landscape, with painting serving as a daily discipline and a way of taking part in the world around him. Murphy’s quiet, contemplative and intimate views segment his observations and allow new perspectives on the ordinary. 

Weaving through ideas of representation/abstraction and made/natural, this group of human-scale paintings are underpinned by a commitment to calm observation and careful thought. River Town and Temple show us monuments in what feels like a fleeting instant, whereas Across the Ravine and Rainstorm/Puddle seem to meditate on passing phenomenological moments. The only work that includes a specific place name in its title, Outside the Louvre, captures a construction ship loaded with sand motoring down the Seine, with the eponymous monument only referenced. Bartram’s Tree Study and Bluff, depicting the hard-edged meeting of elements, push against the flatness of the medium, their passages fittingly worked at and confounded. More broken down are Night Window and Shoreline Sketch, both of which dissolve their painted subject into the physical object.

Though Murphy’s paintings allude to immersion in contemporary actualities, they are neither a social critique nor a call to action; instead they are documents and interpretations of a transitional time in culture marked by confidence and doubt, excitement and trepidation. In them the artist finds, “the hope of discovering something shareable at the base of observing, remembering and being there.”