Jeff Murphey- a life long passion for flowers and painting
Posted on Nov 17, 2019
It feels like I’m stepping back in time when I meet up with Jeffrey Murphy who resides in a charming old blue stone building in the heart of Belgrave. I’m welcomed into a room that is adorned with his beautiful and colourful still life and flower arrangement oil paintings.
While I chat with Jeffrey, he sips a red wine and reveals that he was taught to paint in the traditional sense, not through TAFE or University like most artists these days, but the master apprentice style of teaching and learning. He learnt by working alongside artists that he admired, such as Glenda Wise, gradually soaking up everything they knew.
He describes how, when he first started painting, he couldn’t actually afford to buy a range of colours and instead only had black and white paint to work with, so all his paintings started out monochromatic. Fast forward and his paintings are now full of colour, texture, light and shadow and created using the highest quality oil paints, canvas and timber stretcher bars.
He explains that still life is actually an incredibly difficult subject matter to paint well, but this has been his passion for a long time, along with flowers which he has always been drawn to. He recalls a time when he was very young, where he would save his pocket money and walk to the nearest nursery to buy plants rather than toys or sweets like other kids his age. Eventually he owned his own immaculate garden which he says was fabulous inspiration for his work, but since moving he has missed having a garden of his own.
Jeffrey has been painting for 30 years now and has been a full-time artist for the last 18. He has also been an artist in residence at the Sherbrooke Art Gallery, Belgrave, for the last 15 years where he also teaches art classes. Jeffrey has won numerous art awards and his work is in many collections both locally and Internationally.
If you know someone who would love a unique artwork created by a truly passionate, dedicated and exceptionally talented artist, why don’t you arrange a CoFund for their next birthday and maybe surprise them with an original Jeffrey Murphey, created in the heart of the Dandenong Ranges: https://gallerygift.com.au/artist/71