NOTE: This is a collaborative text with a journalist friend of mine done for my exhibit "Stories" at Simon Watson in 1991. I transmitted my "story" orally to Paul and he translated what he heard into the text you read below. He didn't tape the interview but took notes. Some of the information he relates doesn't correspond to what I told him orally, which illustrates the instability of information in much the same way as I try to do with my other art work.

My statement for the exhibit can be found at http://artnetweb.com/iola/journal/history/1991/9102aa.html

-- ROBBIN MURPHY 1999

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ROBBIN MURPHY BY PAUL RYKOFF COLEMAN

Vladimir Nabokov finished his long-hand version of Lolita in 1954 and began looking for a publisher. Thirty-seven years later the Lolita whom artis/madman Humbert Humbert created as the light of his life, fire of his loins is well known to us all. "Lolita" is about many things. For me, it is an author's personal vision of postwar America with its interstate highways and cheap motels and diner-flashing neon. In his foreward to the book, John Ray, Jr., PhD writes that Lolita "should make all of us -- parents, social workers, educators -- apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world."

So I too was born in 1954, an artist and a madman with my own vision of a better America -- although I didn't realize this until many years later.

I was bom near the lake resort of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. I came into this world through a Caesarean section. My older brother was also born by Caesarean, with his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. The doctors didn't want to take any chances with me. As it turned out, my cord was where it should have been.

When I was eight or nine my family moved to nearby Spokane, Washington. My father, Raphael, worked as an electrician at the Farragut Naval Base in Idaho. My mother, Ethel, was a housewife. We lived near Dog Town, an Irish community by the railroad tracks, where dogs and cats ran wild.

There are not many images of dogs and cats in my paintings. I don't know why I pick the images I do. Actually, my friends say I know only too well why I paint certain images. Okay, so I have some idea. I spent my summers on Peone Prarie, a farming community where my mother was born. I worked on my uncle's farm, out by Davenport, Washington, riding in the back of the Harvester keeping the chute clear and bailing hay. After a hard day's work, my cousin and I would go out to the fields to shoot rabbits. I had a .22 rifle, a family gun, which my mother only recently sold. We had no practical reason to shoot the rabbits; it was for the joy of the kill.

I always liked looking at the grain elevator from afar, a large canister raised in an open fieid of dried yellow wheat.

I get images from the time I spent in public parks. When I was a kid I went to Yellowstone with my family. This is what I wrote in my "Yellowstone Diary", in block letters:

~Today I tried to get a picture of Old Faithfull [sic]. I got two pictures and a free bonus, a shower. When the gaeyser [sic] came up the water blew over onto us. And you know what happened next!"

~We left for the Lake about 2:30. For the first time in the trip I saw some bears."

A good deal of my images come from these outdoorsy memories, but I was still far from being an artist. I got my college degree, a BFA, from Fort Wright College of the Holy Names in Spokane.

Except for having my first experience with a forest fire, the four years were largely insignificant. This is what happened: a fire raged outside of town. Nuns from the school tacked a picture of Mother Mary Rose to a tree and the fire stopped. The nuns wanted to make Mother Mary Rose a Saint.

I can't remember when I started painting for real. I was in an MFA program at Indiana University but found the program too academic and left. Now my friends say what I do is academic, intellectual, studied. They say I'm a naturalist because I usually paint nature: the grain elevator, the geyser, barren fields, picnic areas. And then I put illegible text over it all, sometimes specific to the painting, sometimes not. There's a lot to this, more than I can explain. Sometimes the text is Xenophon, sometimes Nabokov, sometimes Emerson, sometimes Whitman, sometimes Thoreau.

One critic trying to explain my work wrote in a now-defunct arts journal, "A painting is a text. We read a painting the way we read a book. Sometimes the language is difficult, sometimes it's convoluted. When Murphy wants the reader of his painting to understand the text he'll still make it difficult, hiding raised ietters in the text. But they still have to be looked for. Nothing is apparent. It's all a semiotic kind of thing. If he'd stayed in graduate school, there'd be no question he'd be producing work of genius."

I was billy clubbed by NYPD officers during the 1988 Tompkins Square Park riots. I was an innocent bystander, singled out for abuse by the cops. I settled with the city and produced a series of new paintings I called "Arboretum". The images included Smokey Bear. He's a product of the National Park Service, a constnuct to warn campers on the dangers of forest fires. But he's actually the cause of more fires. My cousin, who is a park ranger, told me that it's better policy to let fires burn as part of their natural force.

Smokey is a symbol of authority. Fire is authority. Officers of the New York City Police Department are authority. The badge is a symbol of authority. I've painted all these things, obscuring them with words. One of my paintings shows a ghastly forest fire burning in yellow and orange hues. The text is "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience". Do you fight the fire?

To retum to .'Lolita", Humbert Humbert was an artist and a madman. I don't think I approach the latter, except sometimes I think it's somewhat insane to spend so much time transfering text no one is supposed to read anyway. That art critic summing up what my work was about to him, wrote, "Murphy's paintings show a vision of America that can only better the world for all". Destruction and reformation. Authority and counterauthority. I'm told that's what my paintings are about, but it's up to you to decide. I only create the things.

Paul Rykoff Coleman
copyright 1991