Seeing life through the eyes of an artist: Fiona Murphy builds a legacy painting Brasilia and preparing young lives

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Fiona Murphy is a woman with an intense demeanor that shifts between creative and analytical; she is a uniquely prolific artist with a richly varied range that manages to maintain a signature style through an art based on ideas and feelings, conceptual through a variety of aesthetic considerations.

Her fiery eyes have a magnetic draw that is undeniably Irish, yet she is a world citizen, sensible and idealistic, a consummate artist and a complex human being.

Murphy is a real-world learner, and she translates that well into her role as Art Director at the American School in Brasilia, inspiring a passion for learning and preparing for life through art. A visit with her becomes an opportunity to be immersed in her world and become one of her pupils for a while.

The big, open area at the entrance to her house is an atrium-like room that is both her living area and her own personal gallery. There is little distinction between the rooms that include her kitchen, but the entire area is displaying a dozen paintings of all sizes; that is when you realize she has painted the planters there too, like the ones at the entrance.

They are, in fact, pieces of her art arrayed to complement the paintings on the walls. Altogether, they make it clear you are in the house of an artist who lives her work.

It is an artistic joyride that challenges your notions of how an artist’s body of work is supposed to look and what it could be about. “No meaning,” she says. “I try to capture a feeling.” There is packed significance in that that we will explore below; but beyond that threshold, the rules of engagement have changed, it is clear now that she does not easily fit into any one mold of artist.

Without a mask now, behind faint laughter lines her intensity is evident. Those Irish eyes are not smiling, but there is power in them. As she talks, she has a tendency to cast those acutely woven green/brown threads onto a space somewhere between you and the rest of the universe. There is a curiosity and interest in them that she admits is the essence of her art, in those moments, you can see her mind at work, alternately intense and drifty.

She is a complex, analytical thinker, an artist who makes simple forms speak powerfully in the language of feeling in a manner that can be at first unsettling, then strangely comforting, and —upon reflection— intensely interesting.

She works the colors and shapes, lights, and shadows well, but her art is about the essence beyond the visual perception of the physical subject, the life that might be there in any one moment.

In her development as an artist, Murphy has gone through many phases; in her current phase she is focusing her work on a Brasilia series, imbuing her work with a passion, thoughts, and playfulness that speak calmly, without urgency, in the language of feeling.

There is a critical, cerebral edge in her strive to depict scenes of the city that convey their inner states of ephemerality.

If architecture is frozen music, then Brasilia is an edgy concert, at times whimsical, full of a specific kind of beauty and form, and designed to elicit emotions of future and destiny, of values and belonging. That is both the worth and the challenge in front of her.

The city has a special relationship with its sky, its sea, the locals call it, and how it interacts with the skyline of its buildings. Murphy’s Brasilia paintings capture the excitement of the juxtapositions in a unique and powerful way that subtly translates the vibe of the city through an artistic communion with its architecture,

She has been depicting familiar places in simple shapes with complex tugs at the way we feel life, as in her depiction of Brasilia’s iconoclastic cathedral against pastel tones of sky.

She contrasts its white and blue design with a range of light tints of red capturing the unusual, the peculiar, the Cerrado setting of the city with its iron dust and the feelings it claims from us – under her brush, a religious building becomes a moment of prayer between city and sky.

You can view Murphy’s Brasilia Series here.

Taking it in.

Dominating the room is a large abstract and colorful aerial close-up of the city’s modernist elements from a perspective a few thousand feet up in the air — the silhouette of its landmark Juscelino Kubitschek Bridge, the trademark “tesourinhas” – clover leaf exchanges in the city’s thoroughfares, and Brasilia’s unique superquadra urban design in a mashup that is a reflection on the worlds beyond worlds and times beyond times in front of us. 

The interplay of color, focus, and forms of the city create a profound impressionistic beauty that elicits an emotional response when the familiar is recognized outside the bounds of everyday experience. “Feeling” in a way you did not expect.

On a side wall, the futuristic dome of the National Museum is the subject of a mid-sized painting in her Brasilia series. White and light rise to the sky with acute but moderated wattage drawing the Oscar Neimeyer geometrical shapes against the blues of the Brasilia sky and the gray of its concrete plaza.

It is not so much how she sees the building, as is the feelings it extracts from you about what lies behind it, playing the many-sidedness of things, conveying feelings of time and timelessness.

Indeed, it is art that stops time and makes us think about our own surroundings. The small outline of a man in apparent proportion to the buildings ensures that the geographic moment is kept alive. One can almost feel the little black silhouette’s desire to take on the magnitude of the structure, the bigness of the setting.

So, it is Brasilia coming alive on a canvas on Murphy’s wall in a simple but intense experience that keeps percolating in your memory long after you see it. This has the effect of revealing something much bigger about the building, about life, time, and change.

It is a minimalist style that brings on big feelings without unnecessary frills, it is work that seems forever on the verge of becoming something else.

The obvious brushstrokes that depict the man give the painting an unfinished feel, but Murphy says she stops when she has the feel she wants. Life isn’t finished. The analysis goes on. Feelings change. Yes, that is what I feel.

Across the room, one of Murphy’s paintings is buzzing with a delicious pull. A meticulously drawn lemon slice large-scale painting is transfixing in its detailed perspective of juicy citrus pulp. Her use of a smaller brush to give the slice texture makes it feel like it is something you can taste. It is a heightened approach to realism that borders on the personal.

She tells how she began the process, drawing each vesicle, each line of gleam in each bulbous pulp, then each slice of pith, enthralling herself in the freehand process until she had her entire creation in front of her.

It is as if her imagination and subject had a direct connection. The result feels authentic, unembellished yet bigger than life, and loaded with a feel of reverence and fancy.

Taken together, her paintings surrounding you punch above their weight. They can puzzle you, challenge you, play with you, start a conversation, perhaps an inner debate as to the feelings they evoke, even uplift you without concern as to what they mean. “It does not mean anything, it is a feeling,” says Murphy.

It is a feeling that sets up illusions that lay the language of painting before your eyes as her dashes and rashes of paint draw you into her images with an intensified attention.
Like her eyes, her paintings speak an inner language, yet it is the extraordinary story of her life that holds the key to the magnitude of the artist she is, and reveal what is behind new creations

A mind enriched through travel.

Born in Cork County in southern Ireland, she was drawn to art at an early age, sketching fish and other things and focusing on the details, miffing her father with her artistic persistence. It would lead her to study at one of Europe’s finest art schools, the Limerick College of Art and Design.

Her next stop was the creative environment of Florence, the city that celebrates the triumph of the power of art. There, among the marble of Michelangelo’s David and some of the finest paintings of the Rennaissance, she flourished into the student that becomes the teacher going from there to teach orphans in rural, agricultural northeastern Brazil.

Her transformation continues as she nears the turn of the century with a turn at the International school of Havana, Cuba teaching and interacting with children from around the world and her personal growth moves from Monet impressionism and realism to experimenting that forges her own style.

She tells how she saw the old, gray city of Havana and turned that disappointment into a community project to add color to the city painting murals on schools, hospitals, and other Havana walls.

Incessant and untiring, Murphy expanded her own personal journey using Fidel Castro as her subject. Her unique “Fidel Series” perspective depicts Castro after an emaciating illness took him from the public eye looking as the archetypal Don Quixote across multiple works. The unified series tells a story but, more revealing, it lays out the depth and breadth of her art and skills.

She held an exposition of her Fidel Series in Havana securing a nod in Cuba, Murphy has held exhibits of her works in every city she has lived, though a Brasilia exposition is still to come.

It was in Havana that her life took a personal turn when she met her international journalist husband. Their life together took her to Washington, DC, where she taught at a private school and at the famed Oyster-Adams DC public school. She would go on to live and paint and to teach in Quito and eventually Brasília.

For the last 5 years of her 9 years in the city she has been Visual Arts teacher and Head of the Art Department at the American School of Brasilia, currently overseeing the artistic development of some 90 students.

In Murphy, the high calling of teaching takes on a particular bend. She describes her approach, letting the extraordinary happen in the mind of the student; she seems just as curious to discover how her students discover the universal design practices on their own, exploring to their fullest. She explains the care she takes, being cautious they do not feel limited by anything, even any rules, Murphy lets them discover that by themselves.

Under her direction art class becomes a net for catching each student’s talent. She expertly provides a subtle scaffolding in which a student can find oneself, to experiment in bringing a creation into being with originality and freedom.

It is a teaching style that trains students to develop skills to find answers and solutions through exploration. Time and patience are a must, as Murphy describes it, giving students time to connect and find their own relevance. Each creation is a risk, each work is done when it feels done. Under her tutelage, the kids are the show, the teacher is the audience; creativity meets possibility and prepares to meet the world on fields beyond art.

That is Murphy’s peculiarly vital quality —a mixture of curiosity, intensity, passion, and joy as much in her teaching as in her art. It is validated by her own personal experience; she estimates that 80 percent of her students apply what they learned in her art classes in their future lives. She is shaping young minds by helping them face themselves in art class.

That is a particular relevance in art we can enjoy, and in affecting young people’s lives — two different paths along the same road in helping others feel the experience of seeing life with different eyes.

To view other art by Murphy, click here.