"Sketchbooks in general ….. seem to contain mainly studies for paintings.
For me, ... sketchbooks are more like a secret and wholly spontaneous jeu d'esprit  …. 
They are invariably without premeditation.  I mean not only that I have no plan when I make them, I also have no plan to make them."    (Robert Motherwell)


Artists have always used sketch books to record their observations - figurative, topographical or conceptual - 'in the field' or in the studio - but whereas they have, traditionally, been used as aide memoires for 'finished' paintings executed in the studio at a later date, for artists like the American Abstract Expressionist painter, Robert Motherwell, a sketchbook can be an autonomous art-form that evolves organically, even erratically, as a personal extension of the artist's sensibility. Motherwell's interpretation of a sketchbook resonates strongly with the Northern Irish painter and draughtsman, Noel Murphy.

Now dismantled and framed as individual works in their own right, the paintings and drawings made by Noel Murphy in a number of sketchbooks during his six month sojourn in New Zealand in 2008-2009 are presented as a coherent body of work that both records his experience of the landscape, flora and fauna of the islands and illustrates his artistic modus operandi. 

His energetic, essentially calligraphic works on paper are his intuitive response to his surroundings from the moment his plane circled the bay before landing, in paintings such as Dawn Landing, Flight over the City and Harbour, Auckland Bay, New Zealand to his explorations of the countryside in studies like Bark Bay and Whangaparaoa Landscape.
Favouring an aerial viewpoint, these investigations are not traditional topographical studies but are rapid notations of the distinctive features of each locale, hinting at recognisable headlands or rock formations - quickly pencilled marks overlaid with colour washes.  By blurring the line between drawing and painting, Murphy's works evoke rather than describe a sense of place.

Impressed by the numerous sailboats scudding across the bay like water-boatmen, Murphy suggests the movement of the yachts by a repetitive use of a triangular sail-like form that tacks across the page in Sails in the Harbour and Boats in the Bay, whilst similarly schematised, abbreviated bird-like marks fly over the harbour with child-like abandon. The inclusion of scribbled text adds a romantic and historical narrative to Pirates  and the word 'Adrift', half-hidden, scored and over-laid with paint, juxtaposed between North and South Island hints at the sense of physical, cultural and personal isolation experienced in a geographical location so far removed from the artist's 'western European' homeland.

These works on paper, whether the rapidly recorded landscapes or the more consolidated observations of brightly coloured flowers and exotic birds like the Zebra Finch and the richly painted Golden Bird, are all distinctive for their mode of execution. 

Murphy's approach is calligraphic, the subject matter visually abbreviated in a form akin to graffiti and generated almost subconsciously, like a doodle,  more in keeping with the automatic drawing favoured by the Surrealists and the early American Abstract Expressionists like Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock and Cy Twombly than the empiricism of traditional realists.

By reducing imagery to simple forms and patterns, Murphy has evolved his own visual lexicon of marks and he builds up each work in complex layers of graphite, oil pastel and paint so that whilst some works appear composed and considered others look unstructured and spontaneous, linking their genesis to Robert Motherwell's comment that works/sketchbooks can evolve organically, without premeditation.

Murphy greatly admires and acknowledges the work of Gorky, who advocated the process of painting and drawing as  'continuous dynamism', and Twombly whose large scale, freely scribbled calligraphic paintings often incorporate areas of lines and smudges that have been erased and painted over.  These influences can be
seen most effectively in a number of Murphy's drawings of flowers, birds and sailing boats which operate as visual palimpsests - where the layers of pencil and colour wash also contain passages that appear to have been erased suggesting that the drawings have been built up over a period of time, simultaneously encompassing immediacy and memory.

It might take the viewer a little while to decipher and interpret the camouflaged imagery of Murphy's personalised Pitman, but the effort is always well rewarded by the energetically expressive and often lyrical, études en papier that comprise Murphy's visual travelogue.


©  Amanda Croft