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NEWS news news + ARCHIVES
also, four articles from the press listed below the 'news' accounts
from the Albany exhibit of "Different at Every Turn":
Albany Institute of Art and Science, August, 2009:
I been posterized.
For Immediate Release: Baseball Hall of Fame acquires
Bill Murphy Lithograph
March 14, 2009
It was announced today that the Accessions Committee of the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown has acquired the original lithograph “Night Game, the Bronx” by New York artist Bill Murphy for it’s permanent collection.
The print depicts a night game at Yankee Stadium during its’ last summer (2008). The committee saw the historic significance of an image paying homage to perhaps baseball’s most well known playing field.
The print, which was created at the Robert Blackburn Studio in New York City, is one of an edition of 100. Each print was pulled by hand from the stone. The image measures 24 inches by 13 inches. Each of the 100 prints is titled, signed and numbered by the artist.
“I never thought I’d be in the Hall before Pete Rose, that’s for sure” said Murphy upon notification of the acquisition. Murphy, whose work hangs in the British Museum, the Brooklyn Museum and New York Historical Society as well as a dozen other public institutions added: “ I can’t think of a better home for this print. I wish my father was still alive to see this – he was a great player and a great fan”.
SPRING 09 - SPRING 10
  OPENING EVENT, KINGSBOROUGH COMMUNITY COLLEGE, APRIL 21, 2009
Different at Every Turn; Contemporary Painters of the Hudson River
a traveling group exhibition
Hutchins Gallery, C.W. Post / Long Island University
Feb. 4 - March 31 2009
then on to: Kingsborough Community College (April), Erie Canal Museum (may). Albany Institute of History and Art (June - August), Suny Potsdam (September/ October) and West Point Military Academy (November and December).
I have a large watercolor included "Along the Arthur Kill"
NOVEMBER, 2008
"THE ART OF DEMOCRACY" at
The NATIONAL ARTS CLUB Nov. 3 - 15, 2008
opening Thursday, Nov. 6, 2008 6-8 pm
I have an etching included: 'The End Days" (Kreischerville)
MARCH 2009:
 Irish Staten Island
Author(s): Margaret Lundrigan
ISBN: 0738562793
# of Pages: 128
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
On Sale Date: 03/02/2009
BILL MURPHY TO BE FEATURED IN FORTHCOMING BOOK:
"THE IRISH STATEN ISLAND"
according to this book I have work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The big Kahuana. So I think it's a swell book. Available on March 2,
to be published before St. Patricks day by Arcadia Press
a eblast from the past dept.:
To view NYC cahnnel one's coverage of my 2002 Retrospective at the S.I. Musuem, click here:
http://www.ny1.com/Default.aspx?ArID=20846
Ins & Outs (the Magazine of Long Island City) publishes an article about
BILL MURPHY'S WATERFRONT ART:
http://www.licmagazine.com/content.php
then click on 'hilight' and scroll down a bit....
or scroll down below the news 'articles' on this page
March 15, 2008:
From the Art and Antiques Collectors' Sourcebook:
______________________________________________________________________
Dec. 15, 2007;
The Staten Island Advance reviews my " U N D E A D " exhibit. To see the review (minus the color reproduction) , click below
http://www.silive.com/siadvance/stories/index.ssf?/base/entertainment/1197704778249600.xml&coll=1
______________________________________________
November, 2007
My print "From Silver lake" enters the permanent collection of Barbara Walters. (Presented by the S.I.Advance at the woman of Achievement Luncheon, Staten Island)
October 10, 2007
The etching Eulogy for Kreischerville won first prize in the American Artist Magazine's 70th Anniversary Competition for the Printmaking category (in the Dec. 07 issue). You can read what the artist had to say about the etching , and view the whole competition, at:
http://www.myamericanartist.com/2007/10/printmaking-70t.html
August 30, 2007:
Bill Murphy voted "Staten Island's Best Visual Artist" in S.I. Advance Readers Poll
Here's what the Advance had to say about Billy:
Painter/printmaker Bill Murphy finds something about the element of decay infinitely interesting. That may explain his upcoming show at Wagner College, 'Undead,' a eulogy to the Staten Island Waterfront, work from 1977 to present. He captures images of ship wrecks and old, deserted barges. "I just follow the muse to where I feel like I'm being pulled," says Murphy, a Wagner professor who teaches drawing, printmaking and watercolor painting. The 55-year-old New Brightonite trained at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan and was awarded an MFA from Vermont College. He is represented in the permanent collection of the British Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the New York Public Library and the Staten Island Museum, among others.
http://blog.silive.com/aweclubs/2007/08/the_awe_readers_poll_results.html
December 15, 2006 The Council on the Arts and Humanitites of Staten Island announced that Bill Murphy is one of four receipients of the "Original Work" grant. The proposal is to continue with the "Eulogy for Kreischerville" series of drawings and paintings, and for an exhibition to survey Murphy's waterfront work, from 1971 to the present, to be held in late 2007. (see www.statenislandarts.org for more information)
November 28 2006: "STATEN ISLAND STONEHENGE" was awarded the National Arts Club Award at the Allied Artists of America Annual exhibit (Nov. 22- Dec. 7) at the National Arts Club, Gramercy park South, NYC.
November 27, 2006: ABANDONED FERRY (THE ASTORIA) Purchased for the Beckenstein Permanent Collection, Holmdel , New Jersey
October, 2006 "MERMAID AVENUE'" exhibited in the Society of American Graphic Artists Exhibit, at the Ringling School of Art, Sarasota, Florida.
AND.....
In July, 2006, "MERMAID AVNUE" Was acquired by the Brooklyn Museum for it's permanent collection (as part of the New York Etchers Press "A Day at Coney Island" portfolio
INS & OUTS WATERFRONT ARTICLE
- May 2008
5/21/2008
From the moment Peter Minuit anchored his ship
on
May 6, 1626 and purchased Manhattan from the Canarsee for trinkets
worth approximately twenty-four dollars, the shores of the island were
ports of trade and commerce.
They were as busy as they were ugly, and remained that way until the
twenty-first century, when bridges and tunnels began to make shipping
redundant. The ports slowly became vacant, so that New York City’s
waterfront property, typically highly coveted real estate, was a slum
of decaying ports. In the past few decades, developers have gone to
work as New Yorkers decided that it was acceptable to live in
industrial areas. The transformation has made its way to other boroughs
like Queens and Brooklyn, where manicured parks and skyscrapers have
begun to populate the shoreline.
The one exception to this waterfront facelift is Staten Island, where
sometimes it seems that all the ships were scuttled as they fled from
the thankless island that bore them. They litter the shoreline in a
dilapidated
shrine to nautical history. Staten Island is slowly stirring from an
un-hip slumber, as low rents are encouraging a culture of expat
Manhattanites. Based on Brooklyn’s redevelopment, this may eventually
give way to high-rise condominiums and shoreline parks. But for now,
Staten Island’s tranquil burial ground for the commercial kings of the
past can still be explored. These ship graveyards look like the set of
a film or a novel, something dreamed up. Their accidental beauty is a
nearly impossible challenge to describe.
“No one really knew these sites were here. You get the sense of a
place that’s been cut off from time, for a really long time,” says Bill
Murphy, an artist who makes a living painting and etching the
dilapidated shoreline of Staten Island. Murphy, whose work is included
in such esteemed collections as the British Museum, the Brooklyn
Museum, the New York Public Library, the Staten Island Institute of
Arts and Sciences, and the New York Historical Society, does not
exclusively paint the shoreline. Yet the Staten Island native has
enough pieces to warrant Undead, an exhibition this past November of
his waterfront works.
As an artist, the appeal of the shoreline comes from what Murphy
calls, “the double blast of light.” The sky and the water are both on
fire in most of his works, while the ships sulk in silhouette. “To a
lot of people, my work might seem depressing, a reminder that
everything always leads to death.”
The title of the exhibit, Undead,
implies that he doesn’t agree. “The ships are as alive today, as full
of feeling, as when men worked on them, when they were full of life in
the
obvious terms. The inner soul of the thing grows proportionately as the outer shell decays.”
The painting he is most satisfied with, “Last Boneyard,” is based on
one of these ship graveyards, Mariner’s Harbor. It’s a short walk
through a strip of junked-up woods by Richmond Terrace and can easily
be missed if you don’t know it’s there. Murphy went out to visit the
site not long ago, just after “Last Boneyard” was sold to a collector
in Georgia. “Mariner’s Harbor goes way back in my life as an artist,”
he said, working his way through the trees and litter. “I used to come
down here a lot, even in the snow.”
It was low tide (an issue that highly impacts an artist whose subject
is the shoreline) and the “harbor” was filled with an oily sludge. It
was the strange phosphorescence of the shallow water sitting on this
sludge that made “Last Boneyard” so challenging for Murphy. “On more
than one occasion I abandoned it. I felt that the attempt at trying to
capture sunlight on the ocean floor at low tide was more than I was
capable of.”
Two
vessels are always present in all of Murphy’s etchings and light
studies of Mariner’s Harbor, each of which is a cross between a boat
and some muck that has retained the loose outline of a boat. “I know
these have been here for a while because they haven’t changed much from
when I first found the site in 1977.” Murphy has become one of the main
historians of the shoreline, because hardly anyone gives it as much
attention.
While
working on his current painting, “From the Bridge,” he often walks out
on the Bayonne Bridge and documents what he finds. “I can tell you that
the same huge truck tire has been right around there on the shoreline
for at least the past three years,” he said, while looking at the still
unfinished work. “Either that or it keeps getting washed away and
replaced with a new one that looks just like it.”
The most photographed ship graveyard on the island is Witte’s
Salvage Yard in Rossville by the Arthur Kill, the slender river that
separates Staten Island from New Jersey. Seventy or so carcasses are
above water due to the shallow riverbed. Break-bulk barges, ferryboats,
WWII vessels, and tugs all sit, lost and forgotten. Occasionally, two
boats will clank together, or a pilothouse door will blow shut.
The graveyard began as a salvage yard by John J. Witte in 1931.
Since only the machinery and fittings of a vessel have significant
value, it is not profitable for a salvage yard operator to dismantle an
entire boat. It is also the nature of the business to delay gutting a
ship until there is a potential buyer. For this reason, the vessels
simply sit there, valueless until there is a need for them.
Most nautical artifacts have been removed from the site.
A steamboat
pilothouse, for example, was purchased by the South Street Seaport
Museum for use as a ticket booth several decades ago. A 1986 issue of
Nautical Quarterly was able to identify New York Central No. 24 among
the remains, a steamer from which Barbra Streisand sang “Don’t Rain on
My Parade” in the musical Funny Girl. But by now, New York Central No.
24 and all the other ships are indefinable. The salt water accelerates
the rate of decay, and in the two decades since the article was
written, nearly half the boats have been reduced to parts.
Ambitious explorers use kayaks to access the site, since a large
white fence surrounds the area to keep out intruders. Exploring the
site can be very dangerous. A friend of Murphy’s once put his leg
through the floor of a barge. Murphy once gave an etching to John Witte
Jr. to gain access to the Rossville site, but he found it too
orchestrated. “It felt like I was painting in a museum. I need to
stumble on that stuff.”
Many of the sites will be cleaned up as Staten Island becomes more
developed. The old Kreischer Brick Factory area, now known as
Charleston, is currently witnessing the birth of a senior housing
development that uncovered a vast amount of decaying barges that were
hidden for many years.
The Kreischerville site was recommended by a student (Murphy teaches
art at Wagner College), and Murphy can quote the date of his first
visit without batting an eye: April 16, 2006. “I truly felt I had found
something I had been searching for. I also felt then, and for a long
time after, a responsibility to the place. I felt that it was my job to
record the wrecks before the housing development stretched to the
waterline.” Murphy worked more quickly than usual, and so most of his
waterfront work is from this period. Luckily, the old vessels are not
allowed to be removed because they have been there so long that they
are actually part of the shoreline and removing them would severely
alter the tidal pattern and native life.
 
A few weeks ago, Murphy drove out to the site. As we drove around the
housing development his voice dropped to a whisper. “We’ll park here
and just walk.” The woods have all been cleared by now, and we headed
down a newly paved road along the shore, speaking above the noisy
construction of advancing condominiums. “Last time I was here, just a
month ago, this looked nothing like this.”
The Kreischerville barges were bound to lose some of their magic as
the site becomes more accessible. “When this was first discovered, it
was littered with old rusty spikes and nails. Now basically
everything has been stripped.” We approached the shoreline near the
rubble from the old Kreischer Brick Factory featured in one of his
etchings, to find that a few feet away the ground had been built up by
several yards for a landscaped promenade along the shore. Murphy looked
wistfully at the new ground under his feet. “Well, the spot I had made
the etching from doesn’t exist anymore.”
Murphy has an incredible
disposition. He often forecasts into the future, and can view our
current social creations with the same nostalgia that we see in these
vessels. He argues that the men who worked on these ships probably had
their minds in the past as well, cursing change every step of the way.
With thoughts like these, it’s very easy to see a future artist,
painting the dilapidated ruins of a senior housing development, shocked
by the beauty and filled with awe.
– Gary Ferrar
FROM THE COHASI NEWSLETTER, OCTOBER, 2006
(Council on the Arts and Humanitites for Staten Island)
BILL MURPHY - ONE (STATEN ISLAND) - PRINTMAKER
BY BRETT BUSANG
Printmakers deserve better.It's as easy to collect prints as Star Wars memorabilia-they're just about as cheap and are as readily available. Only the most fastidious collector insists on an early edition or number. Most printmakers don't really give a damn about whether a collector owns 6/150 or the last of the run. They are working artists for whom a check represents an opportunity to run out and make other images. Most have other jobs, work obsessively at their plates and drawing boards, and exhibit, mostly, with other printmakers.
Many of the best New York-area printmakers are represented in "Tides Lines: Prints of the Staten Island Waterfront" at the Noble Maritime Museum (continues through Sept.). I would like to take the opportunity to introduce readers of this newsletter to one of them; though I perhaps underestimate Bill's local reputation. Perhaps no introduction is needed. Bill Murphy is an artist whose steady, if fulsome, growth I have watched over the past fifteen years and I'm proud to have been able to look over his shoulder.
I met him at a gallery neither of us frequented-a co-op gallery in one of those fine old industrial buildings people were so crazy to live in twenty years ago. It had a roster of forgettable artist;a measure of honorable intentions- neither of us wanted to leave the area without seeing something, however mediocre.
The gallery was reached by a tortuous flight of stairs and had obviously been without visitors for a while. I don't remember the exhibit at all. Some co-op artists, then as now, deserve better too. It is a pity that the best of these are more or less blackballed (in a negative sense: by default) from commercial galleries that often promote lesser, but more saleable, talents. I think that's another reason why both of us hung in there. We identified with the people who were exhibiting in this gallery and other places like it-even if we were working feverishly to avoid their fate.
After taking a respectfully solitary tour of the exhibit, we retired to a coffee-shop where we started to compare thoughts. I was delighted (and relieved) to find another artist who didn't necessarily swoon at the mention of the smallish talents who were enjoying largish reputations at the time; intrigued by his independent-mindedness; cheerfully provoked by his resistance to some of my own half-baked notions about the world around whose peripheries both of us had little choice but to move.
I learned that Bill was from Staten Island's a place I identified with firemen and sanitation workers. He talked like a guy who might've strayed into business or real estate: a downto-earth sort of guy whose more rarefied interests were tempered by a love of baseball that surpasses my own. To this day, he never fails to mention, in our emails, how the Mets are doing.
Staten Island is an irresistible place to walk. John Noble* walked around the place like mad and knew it better than anybody. His lithographs of the old waterfront life, with its moody infrastructure and proudly decaying tankers are among the most underrated bodies of work in the twentieth century. I would urge anyone for whom the genuinely romantic is not a despicable notion to look for the work of John Noble. His elegies to the world of "steam and sail" are poetic documents of a time that has-even on the Island itself -vanished completely. Nor are they particularly expensive.
Like Noble, Bill has never seen a reason to leave Staten Island. He recently sold his citadel of a house in a marginal neighborhood and moved to another one - on the Island, of course! People know him and are glad he's around - though he is not the art world celebrity it might be possible for him to be elsewhere. He teaches at Wagner College. He's done a slew of portraits of college presidents, and will, no doubt, have done a complete set before too long. He's is as much part of his community as his Rutherford, NJ forebear, Dr. William Carlos Williams.
I consider his artwork somewhat more subversive.
His best prints are almost strident essays on our common mortality: Bill makes a pile of old bricks in front of a big amusement park ride stand, in a symbolic sense, for all of us. He's accomplished, in a series of panoramic etchings and watercolors, the nearly impossible: a sort of Staten Island timeline stretching back before human occupation to our present era, in which man imprint ranges everywhere (while it rarely enhances whatever it may touch.) Bill records the notion of man as dangerous, however, in an intuitive way. His approach to a murky waterfront is marked not only by painstaking observation, but a lyrical steadfastness before which the less committed among us must pull away. I believe these stunning works, which he dedicates to this once-teeming place, accomplish the impossible: they illuminate the unseen while also - as Hopper said - sticking "to the fact."
This transmutation of matter into spirit, as it were, is also present in the work of Charles Meryon, the great French printmaker whose untimely death made a legend of his legend first, and his work second. This is unfortunate in that the work, in this case, was much greater than the man. Most artists can only give you one aspect of reality,and a lot do that very competently. The artist who can open up multiple dimensions rivets, rather than merely entertains; he or she provides us with a breadth of understanding language cannot adequately express.
Rembrandt is another of these artists, even if his work has finally come to match his legend.
We rarely know our great when they're among us. They seem too ordinary; too approachable; 'just folk," as it were. Did anybody ever give a second thought to the balding, roundshouldered fellow who spent so much time looking after The Globe Theatre? William Shakespeare was a little guy who might've become an aldermen if he'd stayed in Stratford! Great, but unremarkable? Possessed with extraordinary capacities, yet unassuming and inconspicuous? In Bill's case, these contradictions are mostly true. He wouldn't give up his life as father and homeowner easily and, at present, nobody's asking him to. He hasn't finished with Staten Island as a place to watch - though he's ventured into New Jersey lately - the scene of one of his best recent prints.
Also into Coney Island, which is somehow as connected to Staten Island as it is to Brooklyn - where he sets up his easel as well. Yet Staten Island is the staging-area for most everything Bill does and, like Constable's soggy Deptford, is more than place enough for him.
* Bill remembers Noble differently. He said this of Noble's ambulatory enthusiasm: "Sorta doubtful. he knew the old industrial area (Richmond Terrace) and how to get to the Paramount Bar and Grill to Demyan's Hofbrau to Bayonne and his studio."
THE SOUL OF THE THING
by Bill Murphy
11/1/2007
The Exhibit “Undead” will
take place in two locations: The Wagner (or ‘Atrium’) Gallery will show
large and more ‘finished’ works; the Spotlight Gallery (In the Horrmann
library) will exhibit smaller studies and related older pieces.
SOME NOTES ABOUT THE WORK: THE INNER SOUL OF THE THING
If there is a heart to this exhibit it is the work that was done at two
sights, (both on Staten Island), the areas known as Kreischerville and
Mariners Harbor.
Mariners Harbor goes way back in my life as an artist. In fact I recall
when I first stumbled upon this spot I mistakenly call ‘the last
boneyard’ – it was late spring of 1977. I’ll even go so far as to say I
was listening to the Yankees play the then brand new Toronto Blue Jays
in an afternoon baseball game when I drove my 1970 Dodge Dart away from
my apartment at Caddell’s Dry Dock on Richmond Terrace, on a mission to
no where specific – a mission to look for something to draw (a journey
I’ve started on many, many times over the last 50 years. I think it
began with: “Hey mom, what can I draw?” when I was about 5 or 6 years
old ).
The little sketch of an etching called Skeletons (which
is hanging in the Main Gallery, in the Union building) was the result
of that particular afternoon’s search. Little did I know that I would
return many times over the next 3 decades. But who can know such a
thing before hand?
In ’92 I did the long double etching ‘Mariners Harbor, Low Tide”;
and again, in 2004 I did the even longer “Last Boneyard” watercolor.
Lots of studies and related, unfinished ideas spawned from this place
from a period of over thirty years can be seen in both galleries.
I think the Last Boneyard watercolor is the most
satisfying painting I’ve ever done. (Ask me next week, and the answer
might be something else). One of the reasons I feel that way is
because of the struggle that went into making the picture. Working on
location, making studies in a January cold spell. On more than one
occasion I abandoned it - I felt that the attempt at trying to capture
sunlight on the ocean floor at low tide was more than I was capable of.
Kreischerville is the name I like to call a part of Staten Island more
commonly known today as Charleston. (Actually, I shortened it to
‘K-ville” for myself and friends well before a TV show of the same
name appeared). In the late 19th century to mid 20th century it was a
hub of commercial shipping as well as the home of the famous Kreischer
brick factory. Like so many things in my life it started as rumor.
“have you ever drawn those old barges over by the Outerbridge?” What
barges? Where? I had looked for them a long, long time.
It became clear when one of my drawing students, Richard Williams, a
retired policeman and, like myself a ‘native’ Staten Islander, told me
there was something out on Arthur Kill Road I might like to draw. He
explained that in place of the old Kreischer brick factory a new many-
acre housing development was in the process of going up, revealing, for
the first time in years, a long row of decaying barges, ferries,
schooners and other wooden sailing vessels.
The mystery was solved. I had never been able to find the place because
the years of overgrowth covering the abandoned land and buildings was
far too thick to pass or see through. So a day or two later – it was
the Saturday before Easter Sunday, 2006 – I took the long drive to the
‘other side of the Island’ (as my father always said) and I saw
something that made me very excited. Luck –or Fate - what ever that
strange force is – was with me that early spring day.
Without knowing
it, I had picked late after noon for my excursion – the time of the
lowest tide in the Kills. That, combined with the strong early spring
sun setting on the array vessels caused a very strong emotional
reaction in me. I truly felt I had found something I had been
searching for. I also felt then, and for a long time after, a
responsibility to the place. I felt that it was my job to record the
wrecks before the housing development stretched to the waterline – and
leading to their eventual removal (later I learnt the old vessels have
been there so long they have become the water line, and to remove them
would severely alter the tide pattern as well as the native life
(Canadian geese, muskrats, deer, etc)).
 
Luckily, I did not learn this
till months later – causing me to work in a frenzy of urgency through
the summer and spring, trying to get it all before it disappeared. I
clearly recall having the notion of not just drawing these vessels, but
of doing their portraits. To me it was a secret place, a museum in the
wild, and it was my job to somehow get in under glass – and keep doing
so until the greed of the developers turned these ships into ashes.
It’s been pointed out to me by a few friends and artists that my
fascination with these decaying forms is really a statement about the
passing of time, my time, and my life. I can’t deny that in middle age
one becomes well aware of what in eastern religions is known so well -
the absolute transient nature of the universe we inhabit.
I think the resulting five “finished” pictures from Kreischerville do
sum up my feelings towards the place – at least for the time being.
A note about my title;“Undead”
The dictionary defines dead as ‘showing little indication of feeling or
vitality”. I tried to sum up my feelings about the abandoned and
forsaken things I have drawn with the title “Undead”; nothing could be
truer than to say they are as alive today, as full of feeling, as when
men worked on them, when they sailed or received sailors; when they
were full of “life” in the obvious term. The inner soul of the thing
grows proportionately as the outer shell decays.
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