Every painting in Deirdre Murphy’s  exhibition “The Bliss of Growth,” makes vividly clear the aptness of her title.  The phrase, taken  from a sanskrit poem, reflects the ecstatic and energetic relationship the artist seeks with her work, but also refers to the rapid evolution of themes in the

paintings themselves.  Each  is a finely wrought template of experimental gestures, a laboratory of risky choices.  The choices are not random, rather they are directed by the artist’s fascination with patterning as it is found both in nature and in design; in culture. 

Murphy utilizes a number of strategic approaches to bring “natural” and “cultural” images together;  juxtaposing, layering, compressing. She works with a clear conceptual strategy, but her choices are highly intuitive.   The paintings are gorgeous, but more than that, they force us to contemplate the terminally ambivalent relationship we hold with the environment around us. We seek to understand what we see (and further, to describe what we see) clearly and without distortion for we suspect that “truth”, by which we mean virtue, depends upon our doing so.  At the same time, however, we cannot help but distort, to impose our will.  We can never be fully objective for it is in our nature to embroider and enlarge upon what we see-we are driven to decorate, to improve on nature and to create new truths and new virtues.Murphy’s work tell another, interweaving story of her painter’s journey from realist to abstractionist to sly conceptualist, the author of beautiful paintings, brimming with ideas, but ruled by the heart.