Hello, my name is David Murphy. I am a fifty-four-year-old (b. 1971) isolated, Irish, hardcore expressionist/realist painter, and writer, living and working in Dublin, Ireland. I have never sought to shock people with my art, rather I have sought understanding. However, I am an outcast of the art world and reluctant outsider artist. I have painted since before I can remember, but I have been painting seriously for forty-four years - and my surviving oeuvre contains thirty-eight years worth of paintings and drawings. The greatest artistic influences on my work have been Gothic, Baroque, Romantic, Realist, Expressionist, Neo-Expressionist, and Outsider Art.
A list of my subjects would include self-portrait busts, nude self-portraits, female nudes, kissing couples, erotic scenes, landscapes, gestural abstractions, text paintings and most controversially pornographic scenes including fellatio, cunnilingus, intercourse, and sodomy. However, I paint porn only to project my loneliness, sadness, thwarted desire, and psychosexual despair onto these transgressive images. My pornographic paintings are subversive art, made on the margins of society. My themes would include madness, abandonment, isolation, loneliness, voyeurism, and mediated desire. My signature and the date of my work is signed strikingly in large capital letters in the corner of nearly all my paintings and drawings - a sign of my huge ego and need for recognition. But also, a signal that I had completed the work to my satisfaction.
My work is an anti-social, solipsistic, explosion of uncensored desire, and unregulated emotion. I make art for me and me alone. My early life was fractured by scandal, illegitimacy, death, maternal madness, disassociation, panic attacks, self-loathing, loneliness, anguish, hunger, perversion, constant rejections from women, unhappy love affairs, and virulent rejections from the art world – so my work inclines towards pessimistic nihilism. My father suddenly died when I was six and a half, and my malignant narcissistic mother had a complete nervous breakdown. For the rest of her life, she suffered from grand mal epilepsy, and paranoid-schizophrenia.
As a teenager, I suffered badly from an Oedipus complex (an inability to break my dependency on my mother) well into my mid-twenties. I spent my abused childhood and traumatic teenage years, biting my tongue, afraid to anger my mother, or my foster families, and disassociating myself from the world. I was nearly completely silent about what was happening to me from the age of six and a half, until I first tried to kill myself at twenty. At the time, I had no idea how I had turned out the way I had, why I hated myself and life so much, or why I wanted to die. I did not even have the language to express how I felt. My first psychiatrist wrote in her report in October 1991, that I was “difficult to have empathy with”. All my life, I felt like a total outsider looking in at the world. And I even felt a stranger to myself. The only things that made me cry for help, during my multiple suicide attempts between October 1991 and January 1994, was my sudden mood swings, cowardice, and deluded artistic ambition. When I was aged twenty-one and my second therapist gave me a personality test, she found, I had the lowest self-esteem of any client she had ever had. I realised my secrets were killing me like a poison, and since then I have never been able to shut up!
My work was a rebellion against the Nationalistic, Catholic, right-wing, provincial, and paternalistic Ireland - I grew up repressed under. I loathed the complacent conservatism of the Irish art world, conformism of Irish society, and conspiracy of silence that surrounded sex in Ireland. Living in Ireland in the 1980s and early 1990s, was like living in a time warp in which the Irish were living in the 1950s - while the rest of Europe and America were living in the late twentieth century. Political, economic, social, sexual, and artistic revolutions that were taken for granted in the rest of the West were still treated like abominable evils in Ireland. Growing up in Ireland in the 1980s and 1990s, I was a surrounding by an extremely negative culture of religious intolerance and bigotry; social begrudgery, and poisonous envy; artistically backward ignorance and stupidity; and sexual repression, prudery, and hypocrisy.
My formal art education, such as it is, consisted of a series of night classes taken intermittently over the course of twenty years. From the age of thirteen to fifteen (1983-1985), I learned to paint in watercolours and oils with private tutors, then from my early twenties I did life drawing and painting classes in the National College of Art and Design in Dublin between 1992-1994 and 2003-2004. I also attended life-drawing sessions in the City Arts Centre and Trinty College.
Moreover, I had one ill-disciplined year in Dun Laoghaire College of Art and Design from 1989-90, where I was accepted based on exceptional talent. But my depression and social anxiety prevented me from preforming to the level I had hoped.
As an anarchistic, existential, expressionist, my work is also a rejection of every art world orthodoxy since the 1960s from; Marxism to Feminism, left-wing aesthetics, philosophy and politics, the dictatorship of linguistics, Neo-Academic Conceptual, Performance, Installation and New Media Art, factory and foundry made art, careerism, political correctness, artistic activism, progressive political art and totalitarian Liberal groupthink.
The artists I value the most are those that have dealt with the human condition. My artistic heroes are Pablo Picasso, Julian Schnabel, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Vincent van Gogh, Lucian Freud, Richard Gerstl, Egon Schiele, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Willem de Kooning and Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn.
At heart, I am an expressionist artist; my art is the very opposite of 'arts for art’s sake', in fact I see no separation between my art and my life, both feed from each other to form a highly personal and autobiographical art. My approach to art is distinctly expressionist in character - my work tells stories about the human condition – which most can recognise and read – even if they cannot identify with it. Unlike other expressive painters whose expressionism is merely a form of stylistic filter they apply to anything and everything – my expressionism emanates from the subjects I paint - making it even more extreme. That is why, there is frequently a massive adrenaline drop in the intensity of my landscapes and still-lives, compared to my abstracts and female nudes, and especially my self-portraits and pornographic scenes. I am remorselessly self-critical, and my work is obsessed with the 'self' and the 'other' represented by the world. The fiction of me as a primitive outcast exploding with painterly rage, remorse, and anguish fuels my art and forms its identity.
Since the age of sixteen, I have only ever used artist quality materials, even though they cost more than twice the price of student materials. I have a romantic relationship to my art and materials, with is an expression of myself and my talent with all their flaws. I am intoxicated by the expressive, evocative, poetic, and imaginative power of oils, watercolour, pastels, and traditional drawing techniques. Thus, my mediums are mostly defiantly old-fashioned; pencil, brush and ink, pastels, watercolours, alkyds, acrylics and oils and I use them in a manner the Expressionists over a hundred years ago would have recognised. What matters to me is individual creativity, personal vision and traditional qualities of craftsmanship, skill, authenticity, necessity, and accountability. For me, an artwork is validated by its manual skill, emotional authenticity, originality, and transgressive power. As such I am virulently anti-Modernist. However, I have had to fight tooth and nail, to express my own very private vision against artistic and social norms.
It was only in my early twenties, when I began socialising with fringe members of the Dublin art world, that some championed my art, and they brought it around art galleries on my behalf. However, my work was constantly rejected. Later, my first girlfriend Helen, would also bring photo albums of my art around art galleries for me. They eventually managed to get me several exhibitions - but I collected many more rejections. Later, I went twice to London and applied to four art galleries only to be rejected by them all. My constant rejections from almost everyone in the art world was soul destroying.
If you want consistency in an artist, you will never find it in my work. Most artists only ever do one thing. My art is not dependent upon a single style or manner. It has many strands. Taking my art as a totality, does not mean that it everything is of equal value. There are major works but there are also many minor works of lesser value. However, the cumulative effect gets more powerful the more I produce and the more I complicate things. My paintings are an example of unfettered creativity made selfishly without the restraints of Art Colleges, galleries, curators, or critics.
To date my oeuvre contains over 4,992 paintings (acrylics, watercolours, oils, alkyds, mixed-media, collages, pastels, or gouaches – mostly on 140lb/300gsm watercolour paper) and over 3,545 drawings (pencil, ink, coloured pencils, chalks, charcoal, or permanent markers – mostly on 140lb/300gsm watercolour paper.) I have also produced 4 sculptures, 27 mono-prints, 16 scrapbooks with examples of art I admire, and 78 notebooks with over 3,500 sketches. I have also taken thousands of documentary and family photographs, but I do not consider myself a photographer. I am merely a documenter of my own life and working practices.
Given the Romantic, expressive, experimental approach I take to drawing and painting, I edit my output a lot - especially as I grow older. My surviving oeuvre represents only those works that have survived my own self-critical destruction. On average, I have destroyed about 20% of my initial artwork production. All my artworks including my mono-prints are handmade, unique, one-off pieces - made entirely by myself without assistants or technicians and with the best artist quality materials. However, of 4,992 paintings only around 260 or about 6.3% of them are on canvas, board or found objects - the rest were painted on watercolour paper. My lack of a studio and storage space, poverty, marginalization, and my excessive creativity has forced me to work mostly on paper. Even though such works usually only attract specialist collectors since buyers usually look for major statements on canvas or in bronze. I find paper a finer, more delicate support for painting – which comes with less baggage and expectations - though I have often used the best quality paper money can buy. The sheer variety of papers available also allows me to adjust the ground I draw and paint on and the nature of the finished work.
Drawing is the most creative, pure, and direct medium amongst all the visual arts, flowing from the artists hand and revealing its life force on the paper. It is also the cheapest medium which many artists have resorted to in periods of poverty. And because it is the cheapest medium it also allows the artist the greatest experimentation and risk taking, because a failure is of no financial consequence. Paper is not simply a screen on which an artist works – it is an active participant in the creative process. Ironically, I forced my personal tragedy upon paper and expressed most of my artistic and sexual muscle and wounded machismo on humble sheets of paper. I am a connoisseur of the finest papers and many cheap ones as well. Every kind of paper has its own qualities and I have worked on Daler Rowney cartridge paper; Daler Rowney, Canson and Fabriano pastel paper; Sennelier pastel card; Winsor & Newton acrylic paper; Arches oil paper, Fabriano oil paper, Winsor & Newton oil paper; Cotman, Langton, Bockingford, Fabriano, Arches, Clarefontaine, Saunders Waterford watercolour paper, and Moulin de Plombie watercolour paper; as well as Indian Khadi cotton rag; Nepalese vegetable paper; Canson The Wall marker paper; and Clarefontaine multi-media paper. Many of these papers when placed against the light revealed a watermark.
But I also worked on thick sheets of acetate with permanent markers, my own photographs, porn magazine pages, reproductions of World War Two maps, reproductions of vintage newspaper sheets, pages from books like ones on Sade or women’s sexual fantasies, reproductions of erotic prints, CD album pages, photographs, exhibition invitation cards, commercial advertisements, psychiatric medical packaging, photocopies, wallpaper and fancy papers. But usually, I coated these commercial lower grade papers with a layer of acrylic matt varnish with UV protection to help preserve them. I have also made use of various mediums on paper (individually or in combination) like; pencil, coloured pencils, Conté, Indian ink, permanent markers, gouache, watercolour, acrylic, alkyd, oil, oil-stick or spray-paint. My favourite drawing medium for the past few decades, has been brush and Indian ink because it allows me to be totally spontaneous and my line to flow freely. However, it took me decades of drawing to achieve such freedom with brush and ink.
As a weak and helpless child, I watched my mother go insane from a safe distance. I became totally passive and voyeuristic, and I was constantly on the alert for danger not only from my mother but other women and men. Looking on at the world from a safe distance became an obsession for me. I lived my life looking at art in books, women in porn, and the horrors of the world on the news. Because I am terrified of criticism and embarrassed by praise, chronically shy and loath most interactions with real people, about 80% of my work has been based upon photographs, of which about 75% were found in the media. Even most of my self-portraits were made from Polaroid’s, video-stills, photographs, and JPEGs, because I did not like looking at myself in the mirror, I found it tedious, and disliked the limited number of expressions I could capture looking in a mirror.
I am so introverted that I have preferred to work indoors, under artificial light, at night, from; newspaper and magazine clippings, black and white photographs of classical sculptures, movie stills, television screen grabs, glamour photographs, images lifted from pornographic magazines and videos, anatomy prints, vintage erotica, postcards, reproductions of artworks, internet JPGs, sports action shots, web pages, children’s books, family photos, personally taken photographs of myself and friends and scenes from my holidays. I use these sources as a way of reacting to and commenting on the world without participating in it.
Yet, while these various forms of photographic sources provided the starting point for my work, their real subject was my own expressive manipulation of paint, used to express my anxiety. I deliberately choose to mostly work from anonymous, artless, snap-shot photographs, and I avoid women in fashion or hair styles that are too specify to a given period, because I seek a more timeless quality. Unlike most of my contemporaries who use photographs to critique photography and express alienation - I use photographs as a pretext for my own subjective responses.
The conservative art critic Robert Hughes was no fan of artists using photography and mass media as inspiration for their work but even he had to concede that: “There is scarcely an important artist of the past hundred years around whom a book could not be spun, and a show constructed, with the title “Fred X and Photography””. (Robert Hughes, Horrible!, The Guardian, August, 2008.)
As Baudelaire has pointed out, photography can poison vision. It records reality, but lacks an imaginative component, and as Gary Indiana has commented “the camera cannot lie, but it also cannot tell the truth.” (Gary Indiana, “Report from Paris,” Art in America, May 1984, P. 36.) For me, photography could not depict the monstrous and suicidal self-hatred I had, or the toxic mixture of lust and fear that liberated women or pornography inspired in me. When painting from life I do not feel any need to do anything but record what is in front of me. However, when working from photographs I feel compelled to ramp up the intensity of line, colour, and texture to make it more a work of my own. I do not copy photographs - I interpret them!
The shock of my work is that I take ‘objective’ mechanical and electronic images – often of the most extreme kind - and personalized them. I use them as props, which I manipulated visually to express my individual moods and reactions to such imagery. This was a pre-condition I set on all my ‘copies’ from photographs from 1987 onwards. Perversely, I have always painted from photographs like I was painting from life. I do not slavishly stick to the photographic image as Photorealists do (my alkyd painting Country Road, 1988, based on a photograph my father had taken, was one of the few notable examples of dispassionate copying in my oeuvre.) And even when I have tried to be my most academic, disciplined and ‘objective’ – my pathological anxiety has seeped into the facture of the painting.
My monastic, shut-in, and voyeuristic pornography and the extreme nature of my art is a result of my attempt to develop a language that could express; the pain I felt after being ravaged by childhood abuse, neglect, and isolation; my alienation from humanity; my tortured masculinity; and the apocalypse of my soul. My art and writing are both forms of nihilistic polemic. A puritan pornographer, I am completely alien to art history, and there are few artists with whom I can even be compared. Most of my pornographic, erotic, and pathological artworks subliminally reveal my traumatic and repressed childhood. They are certainly not the work of an oversexed sensualist, or predator, in fact they express the obsessions of a deeply repressed and inhibited man. My tragic pornographic paintings were the work of a disappointed idealist, romantic, and sentimentalist. My brooding obsessional pornographic, erotic, and pathological art is entirely circumscribed by my fears and anxiety. I make my porn paintings for my own satisfaction and therapeutic catharsis - not for public exhibition.
Perversely, although I make erotic and pornographic art – I am influenced by hardly any erotic or pornographic art, because with a few exceptions like Schiele and Picasso I find such work kitsch, simplistic and technically sub-standard. On the other hand, although I am stylistically influenced by many expressive artists, my content is derived from hardcore pornography, psychology, psychiatry, philosophy, and alternative music. The nearest artist to me was the equally transgressive, alienated, and unique Egon Schiele. Although artists from the 1990’s played games with pornography and told jokes about sex - only I fully embodied porn, pathologized it, and thus made it even more extreme.
I had minor solo exhibitions in Dublin in a grotty media centre in 1994, in a shabby anarchist bookshop in 1996, and in a pub in 1997. Then in 2000 and 2002, I had two major shows in the Oisín Gallery in Dublin - but before and since I have had mostly rejections - many of them extremely disgusted and dismissive. And six of those rejections were from the Oisín Gallery who turned against my art once they found there was no market for it.
Despite the initial pleasure of being able to buy more art materials, pleasing my mother, and proving my numerous critics wrong - in the long run my involvement with the Oisín Gallery proved to be the worst thing that had ever happened to me as an artist. I had spent my life fighting for my creative independence, and I had done everything to preserve my authenticity. But getting involved with the Oisín Gallery, resulted in my whole artistic identity being undermined. Constantly criticised for my extreme nude self-portraits and pornographic work and pressurised to paint commercial PG rated work - I underwent a chronic identity crisis. Yet, even when I did try to please the gallery and my critics I failed.
Since May 2000, I have sold over €61,766 worth of art. But I have not sold a single artwork since mid-December 2012. The highest price paid for one of my paintings was €10,792 (The Dialectic of Emotions 1995 - sold in the Oisín Gallery in November 2000.) The average price for one of my works has been around €550 - 1,500. My art is in corporate and private collections in America, Ireland, England, and Australia.