Visitors to the studio of painter Catherine Murphy are going to hear many stories. Each of her paintings has one. She comes from an extended family of raconteurs, with a love of music. I recently visited with her and her husband, artist Harry Roseman, on their wooded property near Vassar College in upstate New York. The property features ponds that have been memorialized in paint. There is also a three-dimensional life-sized drawing in steel—a sculpture of her design—the bones of a small building that echoes  the wooden house that stands immediately adjacent to it.

Murphy has worked with representational imagery since leaving the graduate program at Queens College after one month, first as a painter of relatively seamless realism. She came up in the late 1960s, in a milieu with painters like Helen Miranda Wilson and Altoon Sultan. Lois Dodd was a bit earlier. Moving into the realms of intuition and dream-like disjuncture, her work has become deeper, more irrational and more psychologically and emotionally astute touching on, among other things, Metaphysical painting. The constructions from which she works have a kinship with Giorgio de Chirico, another maker of oneiric imagery. The physical constructions act as armatures for her process. She’s an observational painter. Initially, Murphy addresses the content of the picture with carefully considered set-ups before she paints. They function to hold the constellation of emotional, visual, and psychological elements in relation to each other. This allows her to bypass analyzing, rationalizing, or creating a narrative—the enigma can stay open and unselfconscious—a glimpse of an idea. One senses the imperative of a narrative, but we never know what it is.

By highlighting the vulnerabilities and strengths of her subjects, Murphy treats them with both deep affection and a small grain of ruthlessness. She revels in irrationality but also casts a cool eye on it.

Viewers make assumptions when they look at realistic imagery. If a painter can reproduce what the subject looks like—especially if it’s in great detail—then that is the measure of an artist. Viewers may often assume they recognize and therefore feel comfortable with what they are looking at. But that is a seduction. And that’s when Murphy pulls the rug out from under us. In fact, what she creates is often quite inexplicable.

Elena Sisto: Given their complexity, your paintings must take an enormous amount of time. Do you have a regular painting schedule? What is it like to be Catherine Murphy in her studio?

Catherine Murphy: I try to paint about six hours, probably five days a week. But often the lighting isn’t something I can control, so I have to be there when the light is giving me what I want. I’ve canceled doctor’s appointments, and seeing people. I say “I can’t come today. The sun’s out.” I try very hard not to make plans. Sometimes if the painting is betraying me, I will go to a drawing.

ES: What would you have been if you weren’t an artist?

CM: I would have been a singer. I had a voice once. My father went to the conservatory to study opera: he was a singer and he had his own band. It was a very musical family. My sister sang. I sang. We harmonized a lot. The Irish just sing. In college and high school, I was in musicals. But my father really did not want me to be a singer, because it was so hard for him. He worked in the post office to support us, and on the weekends, he’d go out to gigs.

ES: Is painting a spiritual endeavor for you?

CM: I never know what the word spiritual means. It’s a kind of flabby word that is used in a way I don’t have any respect for. I was a superstitious Catholic. I can’t say anybody in my family was devout. But your neighbors were watching you, so you went to church. My father did not want us to go to Catholic school. But Catholicism had a huge impact on my life, because of the paintings that I love so much. When I was twelve years old, I felt, as many twelve-year-old girls feel, sainthood was the only thing I was going to settle for. And then I realized what it was going to entail. When Cardinal Cushing, the Kennedys’ cardinal, confirmed us in my church in Lexington, he asked, “Does anyone have the vocation?” I thought I knew what the word vocation meant. So, I raised my hand and in front of my entire Catholic family I said, “I’m going to be an artist when I grow up.” So, my joke is, it’s pretty much as close to a nun as you can get.

A lot of my imagery is Catholic, but it’s entirely profane. Some of my favorite paintings are annunciations. And I made my own annunciation—the painting of the bird in the mirror. (Hand Mirror, 2008) I was painting all these circles, and I put a circle of a colander in my lap, because women have colanders in their laps. But I thought that was too domestic. Then I thought, “How about a mirror?” But what would I see in the mirror? I could be outside; I could see a tree and a bird in the tree. So, I had put the bird in my vagina. One thing led to another, and I had made an annunciation painting.

ES: Where did you make that painting?

CM: It was set up in my studio because I couldn’t control the light outside. I was sitting down, but the bird was hanging. I brought in dirt and put foliage around my feet. The dappling in that painting was made with a light that came from the theater department of Vassar.

ES: Did Catholicism instill a sense of hierarchy and storytelling in you?

CM: They’re great stories. It wasn’t the religious training as much as the paintings that did it. They made me understand devotion and belief. We don’t do anything without belief. We don’t get out of bed in the morning unless we believe we can get out of bed in the morning. All those saint stories let me devote my entire life to something absurd. I do nothing but make paintings! I didn’t have children. Luckily, I stumbled onto a spouse. But everything in my life is about painting. What taught me that? St. Sebastian. Religion did that for me, and I’m very grateful. Hierarchy? I’m so disgusted by the church’s rules and hierarchy. I rebelled against that.

ES: When I was growing up, my friends who were the most rebellious were the Catholic ones, and therefore the most fun.

CM: I was a bad Catholic from the start.  And when I did go to religious training. I was always the person fighting with the priest.

ES: Do you consider your work to be feminist?

CM: Absolutely. Every ounce of my body, everything I think and do has always been informed by that.

ES: You came up at a time when people very often said you can’t be married and have children and be a good painter.

CM: It wasn’t because of that that I had no children. I have a complicated family history. My grandmother abandoned her children. People always say, “You will love them. They’ll be yours.” In my head I’d think, “My grandmother didn’t.” I could not bear to do to them what was done to my father. I would have disappeared into a room, and if something was going to suffer, it was going to be my painting.

ES: So you really did have to make a choice.

CM: I told Harry I’d give him a baby if he wanted one, but he’d have to be the person responsible. He’d have to be the caregiver. I would be there. I’d be nice. But the sadness and madness–I was going to give it all to painting. My father was so unhappy. He wanted to be a musician so much, but having children kept him from going on the road and doing what he wanted. He was my role model. He did tell me “If you want to do this, don’t have children.” So it wasn’t the world, it was my father. He knew what stopped him. All the artists I know who have children, have wonderful children. There were just so many reasons not to. I wanted to bet everything on me. I thought “I’m going to put all the cards on this stupid thing.” It’s Saint Sebastian one more time.

ES: Did you have any mentors growing up or coming up as an artist?

CM: The one remarkable teacher I did have was at Skowhegan—Elmer Bischoff. He was fantastic. I can’t remember one thing he said, but he just emanated a kind of belief in me and in himself. His teaching was as California as you can imagine, all emotion and a kind of poetry.

ES: Your paintings are often huge in scale, like a New York School painter. Were they an influence?

CM: Absolutely. Abstract Expressionism was certainly the prevailing notion until pop came along. It was just in the ether. I was barely aware of minimalism. But I didn’t think I was going to be a figurative painter. But all those realists–Fairfield Porter, William Bailey, Philip Pearlstein, Gabriel Laderman, Leland Bell–I went to all their shows.

ES: Did you think you’d be a non-objective painter?

CM: Not quite. More like Richard Diebenkorn or Bischoff. I did paintings that looked like that. That’s what I thought I would do. Then I got bored. I was just putting on a performance.

ES: But the New York School is in your bones. That has a lot to do with Hans Hofmann.

CM: Yeah, and Alex Katz. He was a big, big influence. He had a show at the Whitney when I was still going to school. I have early paintings that completely ripped off Katz.

ES: You use framing in a unique way that emphasizes the overlooked, as if to say it’s a viewer’s choice what they see. Framing is sort of everything–compositionally, psychologically, and emotionally.

CM: Being a painter is the organization of information. And in that organization, you need to have something to play off of. The edges are the most powerful part of a painting. Everybody makes different decisions on how to use the edges. I first became aware of that when I saw Pearlstein’s work. Nobody cropped the figure the way he did.

Everything you do in a painting has meaning and metaphor. By cropping a figure or by cropping a tree, you’re deciding how a person should move through a painting. That’s how minimalism has had a great influence on my work. People like Bob Mangold and Ellsworth Kelly, and even Robert Ryman–they made the painting as one muscle. They decided a person would not move through the painting like Hoffman or de Kooning.

ES: Wait, what does that mean?

CM: I always think it’s a muscle. Claude Lorraine goes through a painting to avoid the edges, to avoid ruining the illusion of the landscape. Poussin too, they all do it. But Claude Lorraine does it so beautifully. You go in, you go here, you go there, you go back again, and you’re finally in the trees. When I first saw a Bob Mangold painting, I realized he was using the edges to frame it so you understand that it’s a single gesture. It’s being held in place by the edges. You’re never not aware of the edges. The edges are always omnipresent. And that taught me a lot. I think about it all the time.

Of all the edges, the bottom is everything, man! All that weight’s coming down on that bottom. I love it. That’s the joy of my life. It used to be something I had to work at, because I was thinking so hard about my relationship to reality, and where am I in this? I used to make compositions that were influenced by Gabriel Laderman. But emotionally that’s not who I am in the landscape. I’m much more where they found the body, like something you’d find in a magazine, a detective thing—the tape on the ground. My relationship to it isn’t heroic, or Hudson River School.

ES: You came up in the late 1960s and ’70s with artists like Helen Miranda Wilson and Altoon Sultan—Lois Dodd was a bit ahead of you.

CM: Helen, Altoon, and I were in the First Street gallery together.

ES: You all began painting a sort of seamless reality. But gradually, you segued into something much more disjunctive and challenging. What did that disjunction allow into your pictures?

CM: We were so beleaguered and marginalized. We became a tribe. We were not very nice to each other if anyone strayed from the path.  But I looked at the art around me and so much of it interested me–minimalism and conceptual work. The minute I saw Smithson; I thought it was interesting. But I couldn’t put it in my painting. Because I knew everyone would be mad at me. I’m a nice girl. I wanted everyone to like me. And I didn’t want Gabriel [Laderman] to yell at me.

So I didn’t let them in, those thoughts. Also, I was with Xavier Fourcade. I was selling paintings. I thought “What if I do this and then nobody likes me anymore?” I got a little scared. I was only in my 30s. I didn’t know which end was up. The most horrible thing about being an artist is that you think that your decisions are all your own, and then you realize that you are the person stopping yourself. Nobody else is stopping you. Nobody gives a shit, not profoundly. Then I just stopped saying “no” to myself.

ES: Yes. As soon as you say no, you know that’s the place to go.

CM: Absolutely right.

ES: It was like the revolution of Cubism suddenly hit you.

CM: I think Cézanne invented Cubism, actually. I always felt connected to Cézanne. He was the guiding light, always, in my paintings. Even in the early figurative paintings. It would have been acceptable to me if the paintings went in that direction, like literally Cubism.

ES: There are some specific paintings I would like to to talk about. The first is Catherine O’Reilly Murphy, 1979. Your mother’s expression is powerful and resolute. There’s a sense of endurance. She holds a cigarette. You’re behind and to the left. She can’t see you. You have the point of view of a daughter who’s intimately studying her mother, like a landscape, as daughters do without her mother being aware. 

CM: She’s watching television. She wouldn’t pose unless she watched television. I had to listen to it the whole time. And I said, “Ma, you have two choices. You can not smoke, or you’re going to be smoking in the painting.” So, she smoked. I’m probably going to die from that painting. It’s a cloudy day painting, so she only had to pose on cloudy days. She had retired from working.  I would wake her up and say “Ma, it’s cloudy. Come on, we’re going to paint today.” I’d walk into the room where she’d watch television. And that was always the view I saw of her. So, it was absolutely natural.

ES: It’s an unusual viewpoint because you’re sort of identifying with the subject but sort of hiding from the person at the same time. Your mother was a working-class woman, a professional house cleaner. Were your parents worried you might be poor for the rest of your life?

CM: They thought I’d be poor, for sure. I was the first girl in the whole family to go to college. Relatives tried to talk them out of helping me. I had to promise I would major in art education. But when I did my student teaching, I couldn’t get any painting done because I was too tired. I was only twenty. I decided not to teach.

They were less scared when there were two of us. I got married when I was twenty-one, Harry was twenty-two. They figured we’d sink or swim together. We went home and lived with them for three years, so I could do a whole bunch of paintings. Everybody posed for me—everybody. They took us in. We paid them a little bit of rent, and I was the servant. That wasn’t much fun. I did all the cleaning and the cooking. My mother could hardly walk. She was a mess—terrible arthritis.  She also took care of children. They got KK, the lovely nanny, and I got my mother who was always unhappy. I’ll forever feel guilty about what my mother did. It was too hard.  Cleaning other people’s toilets isn’t fun. The paintings were getting very complicated, and it took me forever to finish them. It was a big imposition on them. Nobody was happy. But they posed for me.

ES: They must have been flattered that you wanted to paint them.

CM: Mezza mezza. I had a one person show at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Boston. Few of them came, except for my parents and two cousins. Many of them lived in Cambridge!

ES: Next painting: Persimmon, 1991.

CM: You know why it’s called Persimmon?

ES: Yes, because I wore Cherries in the Snow! The color pulls your lips forward into a pout. Applied properly, on the right-hand side of the mouth, the lipstick is pristine, which made me think of Man Ray’s Observatory of Time, The Lovers [1936], lips floating in the air. Those lips belong to his lover—Lee Miller. But on the left, the lipstick is all smeared and emotional. Lipstick has a lot of connotations, like power and glamour but also of a “fallen woman.”

CM: I was out in the world, and I was putting lipstick on, and I saw my lips in a square compact. And I said to myself “This is all about framing. My lips have separated from my face. That’s so interesting.” So, my lips are out there, and my face is back here. I wanted to see if I could make that kind of space. The whole time it felt like a true visitation. I was hearing these words: “Smear the lipstick, smear the lipstick.” So, I smeared the lipstick, and I thought “That’s it!” The voice in my mind was about abandonment. So, it’s really a painting about being out of control. Those were the voices I would not have let in before. Now those voices are always welcome.

ES: OK. Bathroom Sink, 1994, is one of your most enigmatic paintings. A flesh-colored sink and its reflection in a mirror, womb-like, filled with water, with freshly cut hair floating in it, and three tiny reflections of yourself in the faucets. You’ve perfectly captured the surface tension of the water. It makes me think of a saint or a nun, or of Frida Kahlo cutting her hair, but also of liberation—like the 1920s flappers. How did this painting come about?

CM: Bob Mangold painted something he called twisted ellipses. And I thought they were beautiful. They were variations of figure eights–different relationships of top to bottom and narrow to fat. I came home, and I sat on my toilet, and that’s what I saw in front of me, my sink and the mirror above. It was a twisted ellipse. I thought it was very interesting. But I knew to do the painting I would need to build another bathroom so I could keep the water in this one at the right level in the sink and nobody would disturb it. So, we built a bathroom upstairs. We needed one anyway. I started making the painting. It was so pretty. It was going to be a fast painting. It wasn’t going to take me two or three years. The light was controlled. It usually takes me about six months if the light’s controlled. I went to bed, and I dreamt there was hair in the sink. I woke up Harry in the middle of the night and said “Shit! I have to put hair in the sink.” And he said, “Okay.” And so, I got a wig and started cutting it up and put the hair in the sink. It had been too elegant. The hair floated on the surface of the water, and it held for the whole time. Right as I was finishing, the hair started to sink.

ES: The Catholic girl got in there.

CM: She’s there. In high school one year at a drunken party, I cut all my hair off. It wasn’t in the bathroom. I did it in front of everyone. It was long, Joan Baez hair. I just cut it off.

ES: Would you call it a self-portrait?

CM: All my paintings are self-portraits. Truly, they’re all very personal. Certainly, that one is.

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ES: One of your recent paintings is called Double Bed (2022). The space in between the two canvases is like a Barnett Newman “zip.” It divides them and unites them. Both beds held specific people with different but compatible habits. There’s something in this painting about the aloneness that can’t be encompassed by togetherness, or the richness and risks of a shared life.

CM: In my head I kept doing varieties of the pillows. What would I do with the pillows? And I woke up one morning and I asked, “Which side is mine?” The left side of course. I don’t sleep. He sleeps!

ES: You’ve been reading and he’s been sleeping?

CM: Or sitting there crying or thinking about painting. He sleeps very well. But I don’t know how to paint an unmade bed. So, we made one in my studio. I made it short, to be close to the pillows. And I had to light it.

ES: The color is almost Mannerist.

CM: I was in the dark, painting a dark scene. So, the color becomes Mannerist. When in fact I was making up color, trying to make a kind of white. Also, because of my cataracts my colors have gotten a little outrageous.

ES: There’s a huge amount of color in this painting; in the way it goes from violet to yellow. You can’t go further than that.

CM: I was really seeing those colors. At the beginning I didn’t even have light on my palette. I found these little clip-on lights and I could light up my palette without lighting up the scene. But still, there was not enough light anywhere. So, I translated the color. I made the color I saw. And when I put the lights back on, I thought “Oh, that’s wild color.” I’m always trying to paint the color I see but I never succeed.

ES: Color has a life of its own. Color is energy.

CM: That’s a lovely way of putting it.

ES: Your painting, Under the Table (2022), makes me think of George de La Tour’s painting of card players. Or Fra Angelico’s Annunciation, mainly because of the folds in the napkins. The table advances like the prow of a boat, almost breaking through the picture plane. And the red in the back is working super hard to compress the picture, to pull it together. It makes me think of friends flying into an unknown future together—like the last scene in Don’t Look Up–just as the meteor is about to destroy the earth. All the friends are sitting around a dinner table holding hands. I saw this in your studio before it was finished, and honestly, I thought to myself, I don’t know how she’s going pull this together.

CM: She didn’t either.

ES: I think it’s the red. The mass of it is big enough to pull forward and compress the space. So this was a beast of a painting for you?

CM: The hard part was that I had to know what four people were wearing, and how their clothing spoke to each other. But it was one thing after another, finding things and then throwing them out. There were three different skirts. I kept going “Nope.”

I wanted the napkins to connect on the laps and make a circle. When I make a solution like that, it’s entirely erotic. I can’t describe it any other way. You have to feel it in all those places. And that’s where I am an Abstract Expressionist. That’s where those boys laid their mark on me. I was taught “feel the paper, feel the line, feel the color.” So, when I think of a solution like that, it thrills me. The beauty and the simplicity of the solution is what I live for.

ES: But then you are fighting yourself like crazy with these diagonals, right?

CM: Yeah, but I wanted that. We built the table. I said, I need the square on the bottom. What I always want is the illusion of space, but not the experience of space. I want to confound it.

ES: Aside, this painting really mystifies me.

CM: You never talked to your girlfriend in a bar?

ES: I did. But not right in front of a man’s penis.

CM: Well, you know, his penis is part of it. The idea was, I wanted somebody to be whispering to somebody else. I thought, “What would it be like to do a painting, like John Wesley, where all the information comes in from the edges?” I was trying for a while, and then I thought, “It’s too much like John Wesley.” He often uses that middle space as neutral space, and I couldn’t let myself do that. It’s against my philosophy of painting. If a painting is presenting me with either figure or ground, then I know it’s not a good painting. It has to be a whole thing. At first, I was going to put a woman’s face behind them, looking out. I wanted there to be this secret happening in the painting–whatever they were saying to one another. Then I thought, “It could be a man.” But I didn’t want a man’s face in the painting. How about a body? “That’s it!” And I love that everyone thinks something different about what the one woman is saying to the other. She’s being warned. She’s being convinced. This is the guy you should marry. This is the guy who’s going to rape you. This is a no-good guy. But it could also be “Is he cute or what?”

ES: Harry’s Office, 2023. It reminds me of the Georges Braque painting called “Bottles and Fishes.” There is a huge arc in both. There are layers of paper and pieces of information here— the sediment of intellectual life. Beneath the piles is a black box with a protruding handle. It looks ominous, like a laughing mouth.

CM: I liked the protruding-ness of it. Harry is a hoarder. Let’s call it like we see it, although he doesn’t believe that. I always thought it was interesting. But then I saw how beautiful the color was. But what was beautiful was the breadth of the scene. I couldn’t sit in one spot and paint that. Because perspective happens, and it would be going away from me. So, I kept moving the painting while I was working.

ES: It’s sort of cinematic.

CM: The movies have been a big influence on me. None of us are going to escape that. Even with a bad movie it’s fun to watch how they frame things. But what’s really interesting to me about framing is how much our body and our innate laziness makes people accept a point of view while painting. Students will say “Well, this is how tall I am.” Or “I didn’t want to stand up. So, I sat down.” If you’re not getting point of view, then you’re not getting anything. Point of view is a very powerful storyteller. Where are you in there? Who are you in this? It’s such a simple idea—change the point of view.

ES: What are your hopes for younger painters? I mean, you’ve been involved in a whole tradition of painting that stretches back many centuries.

CM: How many times have  we been told that painting was dead? But it hasn’t died because it’s too much fun, and somebody’s going to want to do it, even if nobody cares about it. So, I have hopes that painting will continue. I see wonderful paintings by young people. I’m interested to be in that conversation with people. I love thinking along with the painter, thinking about the decisions they made. When I’m looking at a painting, there’s a whole conversation in my head that only painters could have with each other. Other people look at paintings and they see something else. And I’m very happy that they do. But painters  wonder “What came first? How did they do that?” I know painting will continue. If there are humans, there will be paintings. But I don’t know if there’ll be humans. My joke is, I hope the robots like my paintings.

ES: They’ll be copying them. How do you feel about the cultural context we’re working in?

CM: It’s interesting that people still do like and need painting. Over the course of our lives, a larger group of people have come to respect painting than ever did when we were young. Painting was far more exclusive. I mean, do I think the Van Gogh simulation is ridiculous? Yes. Do I like that people love Van Gogh so much that they would want to go to the simulation? Yes, I like that. I like that if you go to see the Mona Lisa, someone’s going to almost kill you so that they can get in front of you. But in 1950, this was for the elite of the elite. It was only for the initiated. Look at what the Modern is like on a Saturday afternoon. Or the Met. I think because it’s an intellectual debate, it demands an intellectual response from even the most uninitiated viewer. I get workmen in here who look at my paintings and say things that delight me. They say, “I get it–you’re trying to do something better than photographs.” I’m delighted that they’ve had to take that moment to come to that conclusion.

Many people are never going to look at a painting and never go to a museum. They don’t like it, because they don’t want to dream their dreams in front of a painting. They don’t want to put forth any effort. They just want the bells and whistles to go off, so they’ll be entertained. That’s why I’m delighted by anybody’s response to my paintings even when it’s crazy. I know that their brain is just flying when they’re looking at the painting. And my painting did that, so that’s cool.

ES: If you could have one painting from the history of art, what would it be?

CM: Van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross. That’s the greatest painting. I thought I was going to get kicked out of the Prado. I almost got hysterical looking at it. You think when you see it in a book, it’s going to be small. And then it’s gigantic. I was so shocked by it. I needed a bench because I thought I would fall down. Las Meninas was a close second. There are so many paintings I love so much. I have such an emotional response to paintings. I often walk around crying.

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Catherine Murphy: Recent Work is on view at Peter Freeman, Inc. from March 6 through April 19, 2025.

Elena Sisto is a painter and writer who shows at Bookstein Projects in New York City and Pamela Salisbury Gallery in Hudson, NY.