Art By Leigh Murphy

Art By Leigh Murphy I finally decided to build a page just for my artwork to simplify things.

New work
03/21/2023

New work

01/08/2021

Coming soon, Art By Leigh Murphy will also be featured on the new Odysee video channel. It was a choice in order to mitigate any problems that might arise with platforms like YouTube. You can also find my personal page on MeWe for the same reason.

01/08/2021

You can now find more about me and my work on my new YouTube channel (not surprisingly) "Art By Leigh Murphy"

"Silver Blue #2" 36"x36" oil on canvas of a slick Beechcraft Twin vintage warbird. I'm not sure but I think this is the...
09/27/2020

"Silver Blue #2" 36"x36" oil on canvas of a slick Beechcraft Twin vintage warbird. I'm not sure but I think this is the same plane used in the Captain America movie as Tony Stark Sr's personal aircraft. Looks like it anyway. One thing about old planes & similar human mechanical feats is the lore that comes with them. Once something like this survives for so long, it can't help but have people and stories integrated in its own story. I spent part of my childhood living practically under the approach to this airfield. This is the second time I painted this aircraft. The first one was a watercolor that I did and entered into a aviation art show on a whim. Turns out it was the Masters of Aviation Art exhibition held in the aviation museum in Oshkosh. At the time I didn't even know what kind of plane it was that I painted. I still don't know who bought that painting. That's one reason why I decided to do this one.

Chromed out BSA Lightning Clubman cafe racer. 22"x30" watercolor on Saunders Waterford 140 paper. This was the one tha...
08/19/2020

Chromed out BSA Lightning Clubman cafe racer. 22"x30" watercolor on Saunders Waterford 140 paper. This was the one that won a major award at the National Watercolor Society show.
The story behind it is what I like better. I saw this bike at the Riding Into History Councours a few years back. Later on, I got to show the painting to the people who had the bike. This was what they told me then. A long time ago the guy discovered this bike and tried to buy it from the elderly gentleman who had it since it was new. The gent refused for a long time, it was the treasured memento of his past. After a few years, the guy gets a call from the owner asking if he still wanted to buy the bike. What had changed the owner's mind was this. A tornado had gone through his rural hamlet and done some serious damage. The barn where the bike was kept was obliterated and the bike ended up in a nearby lake. The same storm also had caused at least one fatality and the owner decided to sell the bike since it was one of the few things of value he still owned, in order to help pay for the funeral.
It took a long time and a lot of money to restore the bike to this condition. The guy's wife wasn't thrilled by the decision to buy it and restore it. In the same spirit, he gifted the bike to his wife when it was restored. Now they travel and take it to shows, where it consistently wins.

Fresh biscuits from scratch. 22"x15" watercolor on Saunders Waterford 140CP paper. This is a scene of a re-enactor at an...
08/12/2020

Fresh biscuits from scratch. 22"x15" watercolor on Saunders Waterford 140CP paper. This is a scene of a re-enactor at an historic farm near Gainesville. Given the way things are these days, I see a renewed interest in relearning the things our ancestors took for granted. For a long time now, I've been gathering up skills and knowledge to make my life better. It used to be that artists had to do that anyway. It wasn't such a long time ago that artists had to make most of their supplies. It could be said that artists were among the first chemists. Given that there's a longstanding cliche' of the word "artist" being preceded by "starving," why is it that not many artists (or the general populations for that matter) take a more active role in learning to provide for themselves? It really is an ill wind that blows no good, at least I see a lot more people awakening now to the concept that they really do have to be the first one responsible for their own personal sovereignty. Once that happens, it's easier to reach out and serve hot biscuits from scratch to the ones around us we care for and need help.

Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in. - "Anthem"refrain by Leonard...
06/29/2020

Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in. - "Anthem"refrain by Leonard Cohen.

This is one of the better ones of this series of paintings I think. There is a beam of sunlight that hits this spot in my room just as the last light of day fades. I've done several paintings from this spot. It struck me how this ancient shell looks so much like an outstretched hand. It looks as if it was trying to fill itself with the last rays of light. It has a personal spiritual resonance with me in the way life has happened the last couple of years. So much of what even get out of these paintings are only perceived after the paintings are finished and I have the space and time to slow down and really look at what I did. When I'm in the flow of working, it's as if the art flows out of my hands like water and I'm just sitting there watching it happen. No matter how much I try to control how it turns out, no matter how clearly rendered the images, every painting still takes it's own path in creation and I've learned to just let it happen.

18"X24" Oil on canvas.

06/09/2020

Lost 'em, or found 'em?

Brene' Brown has a great talk about trust. She uses a metaphor of a jar of marbles. Some of us never learned the mechanics of trust. Usually that has something to do with things that went wrong in childhood and a lack of good role models. Brown says for those of us who need to work on that essential social skill, trust is like a jar of marbles. You don't want to just give the whole jar to any appealing stranger. That's the way to lose everything and have nothing left. It invites exploitation and abuse. They know they don't have to earn those marbles with integrity and honesty. We are supposed to learn to give just one marble to another who seems like they deserve it, then see what happens. If they act in a way that is worthy of bestowing another marble, then go ahead. They're your marbles, your treasures, and you alone decide whom to trust with them. If someone takes a gifted marble and crushes it under their heel, even if it hurts, you still haven't lost everything, but have also learned something about who not to give a future marble.
"Lost your marbles" is a colorful term for insanity. What a quick way to that unfortunate situation by losing all trust in other humans. We're social enough creatures that we simply must trust someone or we fail to thrive. Exploitative people/institutions know this and benefit by eroding our abilities to discern good from evil and responsibly assign our precious trust.
Who deserves the marbles in your world?
18"x24" oil on canvas

Talismans. 30"x40" oil on canvas. It's the second one of the series featuring sacred things. A Feng Shui golden carp wit...
06/01/2020

Talismans. 30"x40" oil on canvas. It's the second one of the series featuring sacred things. A Feng Shui golden carp with coins in its mouth. Garuda warding off snakes. A (plastic replica) owl skull totem for wisdom and divination. A wishbone for good luck.
We all have our superstitions, but is that really a bad thing? They can be childish and disempowering. They can also be symbolic of understanding parts of the unconscious we all must face if we are to have more control of our own actions rather than let the actions of the world control us.

Long ago before my time, artists held a more integrated place along with scientists, philosophers, and other cornerstone...
05/26/2020

Long ago before my time, artists held a more integrated place along with scientists, philosophers, and other cornerstones of advancing society. There's been a lot written about how after the second Industrial Revolution at the dawn of the 20th century, artists of all sorts became detached from the place where they could have contributed significantly to human potential. I concur with the point that once the population of industrialized nations needed an uniformly trained, conditioned, and obedient workforce - art was deemed unnecessary and an obstacle to this goal.

Visual art became a commodity at best and a frivolity at worst. Or perhaps at even worse, it became a tool for propaganda. I've seen art and the people who create it, suffer from a detachment from the larger segment of society. "When resources become scarce, people tend towards psychopathy"- Eric Weinstein. I have to agree with one conditon. I would add that without a strong sense of inner values and clear moral philosophy, this often is the case. I've seen some very unfortunate effects of the unsustainable insularity of the art world. Once I blurted out that it was like a circle of starving cannibals eating each other to stay alive. In the increasingly anachronistic education system, art has been the dumping ground for people considered a waste or irrelevant. Being an "Artiste" has often become an excuse to allow some of the worst human behavior, regardless of how relevant it is to actually making art.

Maybe now during this worldwide disconnect, we have the chance to rediscover what art can do for more people to expand their natural abilities to perceive, interact, and comprehend the world around them in more individual ways than before. With the resources available these days, it's never been more possible to have more people become like the Renaissance men and women of old. It's unfortunately a lot harder to overcome the social conditioning to achieve that now though.

"Cabinet of Curiosities" 30"x22" watercolor. It's a scene from the front window of the Evolution shop in SoHo NYC. That place was like my impression of how great artists, thinkers, and scientists would surround themselves with the wonders of the world in order to learn from them. Exhibited in four solo museum shows and exhibited in the Watercolor USA National Exhibition in the Springfield Art Museum in Springfield MO. Now in the collection of a private collector.

22"x30" watercolor of a closeup of a fancy custom "bagger." This particular Harley Davidson belongs to a member of the B...
05/20/2020

22"x30" watercolor of a closeup of a fancy custom "bagger." This particular Harley Davidson belongs to a member of the Buffalo Soldiers motorcycle club. I happened upon these folks when riding my own rickety quirky Enfield to a local car and bike show. I had a problem finding a parking spot for my bike - car drivers tend to get irate when seeing a lone bike hogging a whole parking space. One of the members of this club waved me over and found me a spot near this bike. As with so many popular assumptions sparked by pop culture, motorcycle clubs are far more diverse and complex than we're led to believe. Sure, there are the scary ones. This club however was made up of active and retired military, mostly middle class African Americans. They'd rigged a big cargo trailer and set it up as a mobile kitchen, emergency gear storage, and basic rec center right there on the street. Once the members got to see me, they gave me space and seemed amused by me and my cranky little bike. I was given a tour of this amazing command center on wheels that the owners proudly showed how it served as a hub for relief in the last two hurricanes. I only wish I'd gotten the name of this bike's owner. No doubt if I ride to another show, I'll probably run across these folks again.

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Jacksonville, FL

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