Kyle Murrell: About the House

Finding somewhere I can paint has always been essential. My current studio is a garage underneath our home. It is separate enough to disappear into, but not separate enough to disappear completely. Everything can be heard and felt. Footsteps move across the ceiling. Muffled conversations, the television, someone running down the hallway, slippers scuffling around upstairs. I have become familiar with the patterns of the house from underneath it. I can sense when something is happening, when tension is brewing, or when I’m about to be needed. I am never far away from bounding up the stairs.

My previous studio was in a working gin distillery, where I mostly painted at night after everyone had gone home. Moving the studio underneath the house has made me question something I had perhaps taken for granted: what is contained in a space, and how does a painting become what it becomes because of where it is made?

The paintings don’t describe the house, just as the earlier paintings didn’t describe the distillery. But surely these places enter the work somehow.

I think of the paintings as accumulations of moments rather than records of a single one. They are built, covered, scraped back and returned to. A decision made one night can disappear the next morning. Something removed can become as important as something added. I leave the studio, go upstairs, come back down and see the painting differently. The interruption becomes part of its duration.

There are other crossings between the two spaces. Dirt and unswept leaves find their way into the studio; little pieces of dried paint inevitably find their way upstairs. Around the house are stairs, corners, nooks, passages of light, plants that need tending and paths worn through repetition. None of these things are subjects for the paintings, but they belong to the conditions in which the work has been made.

Perhaps that exchange is what has interested me most while making this body of work. The studio enters the house and the house enters the studio. Painting happens somewhere. It takes time, and that time is lived alongside everything else.

Kyle Murrell, 2026