Kyle Murrell: Always at Every Moment

Some visitors came to a painter’s studio. Most remained silent as they were shown the paintings; a few offered appreciative comments. But just as the painter thought the presentation had reached its end, one visitor stepped forward, pointed their foot at a patch of paint on the floor and said exactly what he had been thinking.

“There’s more life in that stain than on all of your canvases put together.”

I am the painter to whom something like this happened, not Kyle Murrell. But I have set this anecdote in relation to his paintings because I think that I and my visitor, the connoisseur of stains, could both learn something from them.

We would certainly appreciate their vitality. There is in Murrell’s paintings a vibrancy of facture which does not suffer by comparison with the world’s more intriguingly worn and torn surfaces. Forceful impacts seem to have left an imprint on some; others are marked by more subtle touches. I find it hard to explain what the artist has done to produce many of these effects but there is no mistaking the expressive variation they give to his work. Each painting manifests its own weight of presence.

Yet physical presence is only one dimension of Murrell’s paintings. Drawing has always been important to him as a reflection on the experience of seeing. His comprehension of the world as a field of forms, voids and energies carries over to the paintings. It’s evident in the way that masses have been coaxed from voids; in tonal gradations that initially express their own vehement presence but then, given time and attention, come to suggest the play of light through a space. There is structure in his compositions, an open structure that incorporates ambiguity. In this respect his work reaches all the way back to Cézanne, whose paintings are seeded in the visual sensation that occurs before conventions of naming and description take hold. It’s not easy to say what Murrell’s paintings represent, but they do elicit a form of recognition.

On the day of that studio visit my paintings might well have lacked vitality but I’m not sure that the timeworn surfaces of the environment showed the way out of the impasse. Consciousness is an unavoidable fact of being human. Kyle Murrell understands this and the strength of his work lies in their integration of thought and feeling into the materiality of painting. His paintings are living entities, poetic and unique.

Joe Frost, May 2025