Saint Mary’s Art Gallery hosts a dream collaboration

Saint Mary’s Art Gallery hosts a dream collaboration

Amid the busy construction underway at Loyola, activity of the artistic kind has quietly transformed the nearby SMU Art Gallery.  The gallery entrance gives a colourful preview to the newest exhibit: the larger-than-life abstract work of JIM, a…
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Halifax artist captures symbolism at sea

Halifax artist captures symbolism at sea

Halifax painter Ivan Murphy spent 16 days at sea in 2016 deployed on board the Canadian frigate HMCS Charlottetown. He hadn’t joined the navy; rather, he was an invited observer in the Canadian Forces Artists Program (CFAP). Murphy enjoyed the trip…
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Observed and Interior Geographies

It was perhaps to be expected. Since he took up the brush full-time less than a decade ago, Ivan Murphy's landscapes have become progressively more painterly and abstract. In many of his recent works, the horizon line (that characteristic signal of…
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The Globe and Mail: Weekend Review, Arts

Excerpt: The pleasures afforded by the landscape paintings of Halifax-based artist Ivan Murphy are gentle, careful ones. Murphy is not a flashy painter and he eschews large effects, taking as his providence the subtleties of paint handling that make…
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Passionate Return

I mostly miss the crows. The urban landscape that surrounds me now has an abundance of wildlife–squirrels, raccoons, skunks, and pigeons. But lacking are the shrewd, blackbirds that are so prevalent in the lore of both my whole land on the Prairies…
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Implicit Absence

The work of Ivan Murphy and Drew Klassen has diverged since their last joint exhibition in the early 1990s, but their paintings still complement each other. Where Murphy responds to the privatization of public space, Klassen demonstrates the…
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