Henry Murphy (b. 1995) is a Philadelphia-based painter working primarily in small-scale plein air painting. His practice begins with direct observation of landscapes and phenomena—from the Fairmount Water Works to French villages, Arizona mesas, and his own backyard—but deliberately transforms these into highly subjective, abstracted compositions. Murphy uses small gestural marks as "scaffolding to form a painting," allowing intuitive reaction to guide the work on-site. His paintings often depict hallucinatory or synesthetic imagery: glowing birds that appeared as afterimages while staring into the sun, thought forms hovering above churches as visualizations of music and spiritual ecstasy, and backyard arrangements of wooden poles reimagined as shamanic totems. This self-taught approach combines meticulous observation with dreamlike distortion, referencing artist James Castle's soot and saliva drawings. Murphy received his BFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he earned numerous awards including the Von Hess Memorial Travel Scholarship for European travel and the Charles Toppan Prize in Drawing. His work has been exhibited at Stellar Highway in Brooklyn and venues across Philadelphia, New England, London, and New York.
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