"I loved to draw and I did it all the time. Did it
kind of obsessively. It was a way of expression and it did
help a lot."
"...The shapes are always referred to as cartoony.
And they are cartoony and blumpy and rounded and inflated
and sort of wacky."
"I absolutely fell in love with that world. I think
as much as I wanted to be an artist I wanted to be different
the way they were different, because it felt like freedom."
"...When you start to get the control then your feelings
can start to flow. And once that starts to happen you get
on the track and the train starts moving."
"It is about making things and it's about expression
and it's about creation. It's not in any kind of high faluting
fancy way—it's very basic."
"You get off the path and then get back on again for
awhile, and you trip along and then suddenly you stumble
and your back on again. I don’t think that process
ever ends."
Well, I drew when I was a kid.
And I remember it very clearly because I got a lot of praise
for them. I drew pipes and elephants. I have a very clear
memory of drawing the elephant and realizing that it was actually
like an elephant. Like how to make that shape, and how the
ears and the trunk were the distinguishing things. And then
drawing a pipe somehow. Just that image... And then I remember–
and I actually have this drawing–starting to draw figures.
I drew a boy and a girl in my mother's address book. And just
somehow I could do it. I must have been around three or four
years old. I could draw and I got a lot of praise for it.
My parents just loved it and told me I would be an artist.
And here I am.
ART:21:
That's so wonderful. And so interesting
in that it manifested so early.
MURRAY:
I don't know if it's the case
with all artists, but I was very drawn to it. I loved to draw
and I did it all the time. Did it kind of obsessively. It
was a way of expression and it did help a lot. I'm sure that
people liked them and responded to them. So it was a communication
and something that made me feel good too. I think the thing
I remember the most when I was little was the excitement of
being able to draw something. Like figuring out how to draw
a horse, having that capability. You know, how many bones
there were in the leg and where like the leg bent and the
excitement of just realizing that if I focused I could do
it. And with practice you get better and better at it. Those
are my primary things. In grade school I would draw pictures
of horses and sell them to my little friends. And it was miraculous
to them. And I guess I kind of realized it was a skill and
that being good at this or that that made me feel good about
myself. I sold them for maybe five cents or so. I thought
it was a pretty good deal.
ART:21:
Were there other early influences?
MURRAY:
I don't know if this is a real
memory or something that my mother would tell me, but we lived
in Chicago up until I was eight and my parents would dutifully
take us to the Art Institute or to the Field Museum—which
I loved. And running around at the Art Institute and being
fascinated by this painting that I thought of as a rabbit.
I thought it was a painting of a rabbit. It was a Kandinsky
painting. And I'm sure it's still there at the museum too.
I know it's still there. But when I saw it years later when
I was a student there, I kept looking at it to see if I could
find the rabbit. And it took me a while and I did put it together,
but it was amazing to me. There must have been some hook up
there for me. My mother was very proud because this was a
totally abstract
painting, so they just thought I was like this little genius
that was going around interpreting the paintings for everybody.
I remember finding it really exciting to look at the paintings.
Of course, I never was in a museum again after my parents
left Chicago until I went back to go to art school. But that's
a real memory. And then the other things were just the things
that all kids liked—like Norman Rockwell. Walt Disney
cartoons. Bob Cain, or whoever it was who drew Superman. Captain
Marvel. I looked at comic books and Norman Rockwell, who I
thought was an absolutely great artist. I loved his illustrations.
And I wanted to either do that or have a comic strip.
ART:21:
How would you connect all those
early influences to the work now?
MURRAY:
I know the shapes are always
referred to as cartoony. And they are cartoony and blumpy
and rounded and inflated and sort of wacky. Norman Rockwell...I
don't know exactly if there is a connection. But I am sure
it is all back there someplace—it's just layers. I don’t
think there is anything you really love that doesn't stay
with you for your whole life.
ART:21:
Is their any particular Rockwell
image?
MURRAY:
Not really. I mean I could name
ones that I liked, like the boy and girl at the soda fountain.
I have to say that there was always an element in it where
it just wasn't real. I mean, my life was not like that. Like
the happy family at the Thanksgiving table. And maybe that
was part of what everybody loved about Rockwell. That it was
all so sweet and unreal and completely not like real life.
He painted the big American dream, an illusion.
ART:21:
Are there any other sources that
were part of this stew of imagery?
MURRAY:
I think that the most important
thing was that my parents were so supportive of art and my
being an artist. After we left Chicago we lived in a little
town in Michigan. I went to grade school there and then a
little town in Illinois. Nature and the outdoors—that
part of my life was a very powerful force for me. I really
liked being outside. And I don’t know if this has anything
to do with my images or anything, but I liked knowing what
flowers were and what trees were and I liked studying and
looking at them and seeing how all those little segments went
together to make a whole. That was a very pleasurable experience
for me.
The other major thing would really be high school. I had a
high school teacher in Bloomington who was a very different
person for this little town in Illinois. She taught high school
art and she was dedicated to art. She was really influential
for me because she was so sure that it was an absolutely elevated
thing to be an artist. She loved artists; she loved art. She
took our class a couple times up to Chicago to the Art Institute,
which is the first time I ever saw a Picasso painting. There
was a big Picasso show there and that probably would have
been 1957, the year that Sputnik went up. And she was just
an amazing teacher in her enthusiasm and belief. She was also
very tough. She didn't give praise easily and was very demanding.
And she got me started on making a notebook, a sketchbook.
And that was a huge thing for me. I found myself with a book
that I could really draw into and write into. She was single-handedly
responsible for getting me a scholarship to the Art Institute
of Chicago. She talked this art group into paying my first
year's tuition, or else I never would have gotten there. Her
name's Elizabeth Stein. She is really a fantastic person and
she is still alive. I think she is around ninety-seven years
old and lives in Chicago.
ART:21:
A good teacher can change you
life.
MURRAY:
She really changed my life.
And it's hard to say. I mean you don't really know what would
happen—if I would have finally gotten myself back to
Chicago and to art school. If it was destiny or fate or whatever
it was, but she made it a lot easier.
ART:21:
Was there another person after
that?
MURRAY:
Well she's still in my life in
a sense, but no. The Art Institute was a very different experience.
It totally changed my life to go to school there. It really
opened the door for me. And when I arrived I was going to
be in advertising/design, be an illustrator, be a cartoonist.
And it took about a year of walking through the galleries—because
the school was right in the back of the museum, so to get
to the school you walk through the galleries—and I started
to see these paintings which I hadn't seen since I was like
maybe six years old really. And meet different kinds of people.
I mean there were people there the likes of whom I'd never
seen before in little Bloomington, Illinois. Like guys walking
around with beards, and poets and they weren't afraid to say
it. They were very political. There were still men there from
the Korean War in 1958. They were really serious. And people
read books very seriously and did their work very seriously.
I absolutely fell in love with that world. I think as much
as I wanted to be an artist I wanted to be different the way
they were different, because it felt like freedom. Instead
of being trapped in your little Pendleton skirt and your bobby
socks and your saddle shoes, you could wear big heavy black
boots and put blue makeup on and say what you thought. You
didn't have to be a nice lady anymore. That in itself was
a big experience.
But the teachers were very tough. They basically seemed to
be there to teach you that you had no hopes and no prospects,
and being an artist was one of the most impossible things
in the world. And you'd better realize that, you know, this
was a life of suffering, struggle, and you weren't going to
be any good anyway. [LAUGHS] And that was the way it was!
So you know, that was hard for a couple of years. You took
solace with your peers. And that wasn't very much. That wasn't
very nice either because it was primarily a male world. There
were a few wonderful women around who were very helpful, my
own age. There was one woman painting teacher, Andreene Kaufman—I'll
never forget her. She was much more nurturing then the men,
truly. It was just the reality with most of the men there.
But the men were very hard on each other too. Nobody was giving
out any compliments there. I had to really find a way to believe
in myself.
ART:21:
How did you do that?
MURRAY:
I think I did it by looking at
the paintings upstairs in the galleries. I would go up everyday
and I would look at this particular DeKooning painting called
"Excavation" And I would do a dance with it. Like,
oh, he went this way and oh he went that way, and oh he smudged
this. Feeling the depth of that painting. When you look at
it from a distance it looks like this roiling boiling pot
of paint. Except the order is within it, is in that paint.
And when you go up to it you begin to see the layers of it,
how the yellow goes over this white and blue. And I realized
he scraped that on, and then he did this over it. And I deconstructed
the painting and I would go back down to my painting and I
would try to do it. And eventually—I never got that good—but
it made me start to feel my body and my mind. My mind letting
my arm make the decision, like intentionally, like control.
I began to get the control, and when you start to get the
control then your feelings can start to flow. And once that
starts to happen you get on the track and the train starts
moving. And it's got stops and twists and turns but something
happened for me then when I got to that point that just linked
me up with it. I realized this was going to be my life. And
there was definitely a point where I really almost chickened
out. I just thought, this is going to be so hard and I should
really get some kind of a job where I can help my parents
and I wish my parents hadn't told me that they approved of
this because then I wouldn't feel like they were pushing me
into it. Maybe I just want to do this for them. I went through
all this stuff and I was going to quit, and I didn't, because
I didn't know what else to do.
ART:21:
Was there anything discouraging
in 1958 about all of the so-called great artists being only
men?
MURRAY:
Well, nobody said that to me
exactly. Nobody said, "You're a girl. You can't do this."
The only time that ever came up was once when this nice young
man said to me, "What's a nice girl like you doing in
a place like this?" Referring to the Art Institute of
Chicago. And I guess I was upset by what he meant, like, "You'll
never be able to deal with this." This world is too rough
and tough. Interestingly enough, you know you think of the
world of art as being so much different. It's not like football.
You know, these guys are more sensitive, they're different.
But I think that maybe there was a masculinity to it in a
certain way that I wasn't really that aware of. I just wasn't
paying any attention to it.
I just knew it was hard. It was just very very hard and it
was very, very different. And I felt like, I'm going to get
out of here. I'm going to go to California or something and
get a job. And I think at that point I may have even sort
of resented my parents' approval, feeling like, "Wait
a minute, who wants to do this, them or me?" And then
I didn't. This was maybe in my third year of school and I
went back to school and I never really thought about it again,
except to complain, "Why am I doing this anyway? This
is so horrible, this is so difficult, this is not any fun!"
It's not what people think it is.
ART:21:
Why did you go on?
MURRAY:
I think I just had it in me.
There's wasn't anything else that I could do. I couldn't think
of anything else that I could do, and also, I loved it. It
is about making things and it's about expression and it's
about creation. It's not in any kind of high faluting fancy
way—it's very basic. And I think it was such a great
need for me. And I realized I discovered it painting, making
art, as something that I could do and that I really really
wanted to do, just for myself. Just completely for myself.
And actually in lots of ways it felt lucky. It felt very very
lucky, because not only are you doing it, and trying to do
it better each time...so that is inspiring in a way.
I love art. I love painting. I love visual arts. I love films.
I love reading. And to feel myself to be trying to be a part
of that felt really important to me, and a real goal. And
of course at the time I did say to myself, "I want to
be a great artist." I mean it wasn't stated in words,
but within myself that was what I was saying. And that goes
away in a sense after a while. That stops being this goal.
Because the goal is more to keep doing it. My fantasy was
that I would get to a certain point and I would know what
I wanted to say and it was 'pcht.' You were on this straight
and narrow road and you would never swerve and you would just
do your work then. And that's not the way it is, at all—it
just isn't the way it is. You get off the path and then get
back on again for awhile, and you trip along and then suddenly
you stumble and your back on again. I don’t think that
process
ever ends. And sometimes I do think if I had known what I
was getting myself into in terms of following this path, you
know, would you? No, of course you wouldn't do it. Maybe I
would. But you don't really know.
