An Interview with Erin Murray

Excerpts from an interview with artist Erin Murray, showing at The Slingluff Gallery Feb 2011.

After getting her BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art back in ’01 Erin returned to Philadelphia and it’s art scene with a mission. Her paintings of urban structures will strike a chord in any metro minded mortal.

AiB: Do you feel your work is influenced more by art historical traditions, your schooling, or something else you discovered?

EM: I think most artists could pick out hundreds of factors that influence their work. It’s a crystallization of everything you’ve seen with everything you’ve been. For me, I’ve been influenced by other artists–discovered in galleries, in art school, and in random books left at my old studio building by other artists (thanks!). Certain teachers were influential of course. The city around me continually inspires–my personal history as a Philadelphian and the circumstances of my youth growing up in and around this city are also a factor in what I make as an artist today. Random things too; I stumbled across an interview of the architect Robert Venturi on the internet and found a wealth of ideas to inform my art. He had a good quote regarding influences from his Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture: “From what we find we like‚ what we are easily attracted to‚ we can learn much of what we really are.”

AiB: Do you always look at life through the eyes of an artist?

EM: I do, especially since my work takes the built environment as its subject. It’s darn near impossible just to walk around the city without being visually overloaded with work that I should make or that someone else should.

Read the full interview here: http://artinbars.com/2010/04/09/ask-an-artist-erin-murray/