John B. Murray

American, 1908 - 1988

BiographyJohn Bunion (“J.B.”) Murray was born in 1908 in Sandersville, Georgia, a remote community in Glascock County. He was a tenant farmer and father to eleven children. His wife left him when he was in his fifties, and he remained alone, living in isolation in a small shack. Murray had hallucination and what his visions revealed to him led to his earliest artworks. His work was meant to protect and ward off the evils of the world. His drawings and paintings display colors that contain a codified system.

"In the early 1980s, Murray started visiting his doctor, William Rawlings, on a regular basis and gave Rawlings some of his writings, most of which were stories about himself and events in his life, accompanied by small blots of color serving as illustration. Murray considered Rawlings his messenger to the outside world. Murray believed himself to be a priest or healer possessing a vision through which God empowered him with special talent. His earliest works on paper had consisted of painted designs and inscriptions on relatively small scraps of found paper, which Murray nailed to both the outside and the inside of his house. He also sealed some of these papers in envelopes and gave them to friends and acquaintances at church. The story goes that his preacher asked Murray to put an end to the practice because it frightened some members of the congregations. These works may have been protective charms—cryptic designs with prayers and incantations—or they may have been rudimentary versions of the more complicated late narratives. (The recalcitrance of his own church and pastor indicates the continuing uneasiness with the African American community about many of these prophesy traditions.)"

"Just as he devised writings, Murray simultaneously developed a highly personal and unusual artistic vocabulary. He lived in an allegorical world, which he studied, recorded, and believed he could influence. His artworks are morality plays, but with a difference: Murray believed that each work was imbued with a spiritual or psychological power. Whether portraying human beings, forces of the spirit world, or the interior workings of the human body, Murray was concerned with conflict between oppositional forces. Most of his works seem to conform to that basic narrative."

"Murray’s inclination was to work abstractly. In the early 1980s, Murray was diagnosed with prostate cancer, the condition that ultimately took his life. About that time, the epic battles that dominate his art began to incorporate iconography premised upon cells and biological disease. The abstract, amoebic forms already present in his work, and the energies or spirits they represented, assumed additional identities as healthy cells in combat with invading toxic ones. Medical and theological imperatives coalesced."

"Murray may have been aware of a physical ailment before the official diagnosis of prostate cancer. At some point in the mid 1980s the external battle between good and evil, shows in most of his earlier work, became more focused on the internal battle between his body and disease. The later pieces were more carefully drawn; no longer were they notations (messages and prophesies) accompanied by brush strokes and splattered pigments. Murray’s increased exposure to precise medical charts and illustrations must have had some effect on that change in his style. Also, the realization that his life was concluding removed much of the spontaneity and free-form abstraction from the work. They are no longer exclusively autobiographical and narrative; they assume a biological and homeopathic aspect."

"For the researcher, it is seemingly impossible to make a psychiatric evaluation of Murray based upon skeletal biographical records. His art, though, does avail itself to analysis. Whereas cultural critics may interpret characteristics of Murray’s work, such as horror vacui and the use of protective script, as indicative of the philosophical underpinnings of a southern African American aesthetic, psychiatrists may interpret these same tendencies as evidence of mental aberrance. Murray was indeed paranoid, delusional, and obsessive. His life and art blur boundaries. He occupies a space where two modes of investigation may meet, where the romanticists of art brut must admit that all creativity is conditioned in part by social experience, and where folklorists and anthropologists must admit that folk culture has its own fertilely unstable margins, whose “idiosyncratic” are often central to the culture’s survival. Many traditions have been forced to survive by being activated at an individual level, among artists who have taught themselves to make objects that give new form and renewed life to old traditions and beliefs."

"There is often a huge gulf between what an artist intends and intentions ascribed to him by others. Because Murray’s artwork is preponderating abstract and because access to Murray for research purposes was limited, one of his legacies is to have become a sort of Rorschach test for the various academic, curatorial, and collectorial constituencies interested in him."

Excerpts taken from an essay on Murray entitled “The Handwriting on the Wall,” by William Arnett

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