Deirdre Murphy’s mostly small, mostly square panels and canvases of vivid, celebratory colors and patterned images blend the constructed and the natural, the art historical and the personal, the fictive and the real in ways that are both festive and poignant.  They are distillations of ambiance and mood as Murphy layers and weaves together images of past and present, the commonplace and the exotic, the geometric and the organic in psychologically dense, visually complex orchestrations. Cerulean Warbler, for instance, depicts an elegant blue bird framed by stylized flora and geometric ellipses in hothouse shades that are both brilliant and pale.  The bird—a relative of the Emperor’s nightingale, perhaps—is positioned in the foreground while the background drops quickly back to depict a distant Chinese landscape crossed by thin red lines that refer to ancient mappings and migratory routes. The lovely Flower Cloud is filled by several crisply delineated bouquets and ribbons, based on the designs of a kimono, that explode like fireworks, lighting up the Chinese hillside below in a burst of flowers.  A building nestled into the hill (Zhang Xin’s Commune Hotel) reflects Frank Lloyd Wright’s principles of integrating architecture into the environment and reiterates one of Murphy’s constant themes:  the multi-faceted, intricate relationship between man and nature.  Font Hill enlarges the architectural context, presenting a precipitously angled structure (a landmark factory in Bucks Country, Pennsylvania) that reminded the artist of a medieval or Renaissance cloister while the composition of Font Hill is based on a Francesco D’Antonio [is it a painting or fresco?] from 1425.  Underlining the identity of painting as a fictive enterprise, instead of real birds, there are origami ones and instead of sky, there are sections of a colorful, pixel-like checkerboard.  Her Majesty features a stately ocean liner dry-docked in Philadelphia and evokes a vanished era and immigrant sagas. The vessel, as steeply foreshortened as the factory in Font Hill or as abruptly disproportionate as foreground and background in Cerulean Warbler, is distorted, as space is in all of Murphy’s paintings, reconfigured by imaginative, revisionist memory.  The boat also appears to be advancing onto the highway in the foreground as if pointing toward the future and an ongoing journey, offering a narrative of departures that poses questions about home, history, loss and recuperation.