An artist’s credo is a proclamation of personal morality and, as such, should remain in perpetual deconstruction, valuation, and revaluation.  A definitive artist’s statement needs not change, per se, but its fastidious thirst for sureness and virtuosity is quenched only by constant abandonment and reconstruction as means of substantiation and a refusal to limit, devalue, or fetter its referenced work to such ideals.  A just artist’s statement blooms piecemeal and patchwork from prior actualized and subsequent experimentations in purpose, motive, and application, creating as encompassing a definition that one’s birthed work will allow while refusing to limit that to which it footnotes. Ultimately, a just artist’s statement encourages longing and reaching for greatness, allows for recesses and minor relapses to the simple and less purposed, and, overall, a just artist’s statement is begotten by the pushing and begging for the outward turning of its petals, yearning for and loving of the sun, achieved through great metamorphosis.

I consider myself to be an artist of the transcendental persuasion, looking to nature and, by extension, to art as a means of reflection, perspective, and, ultimately, non-egoism.  This non-egoism is the ability to completely remove self and self interest from one’s own thought process, imperative for both perspective and reflection, and is one of the many offerings of nature.  This non-egoism can perhaps be best described by Emerson’s claim that in the infinity of nature “I am nothing; I see all;” it is this conception of non-egoism that is the main focus of my work.  My definition of the role of nature and of art looks to emphasize this non-egoism while defining nature, and thus sources of non-egoism, as ever-changing. Nature goes beyond the great grass plains and grandiose horizons, and is embodied in anything from a crowded early-morning market to a cold and lonely walk home.  My work is the confidences of these notions of nature to which I bear witness.

© Copyright Conor Murphy 2006-2007. All rights reserved.