I'm only six years older than the gallery that represents me

I'll have some work in the group exhibition going up at the Diane Farris Gallery next week. In celebration of their 25th anniversary, the list of other artists is pretty awesome. Here's the copy:

Celebrating 25!
December 4, 2008– January 24, 2009
Opening reception: December 6, 2008, 2 - 4pm

Celebrating 25! is a milestone exhibition launching Diane Farris Gallery’s 25th year. It provides viewers with a survey of the gallery’s artists since its inception, starting with new works by Alan Wood, Angela Grossmann, Attila Richard Lukacs, Graham Gillmore, and Vicky Marshall, including new pieces by Michael Dennis, Judith Currelly, and Gu Xiong, and presenting paintings by rising artists Jesse Garbe, Wil Murray and Nick Lepard.

From its early Gastown days, exhibitions that featured such prominent Canadian artists as Gershon Iskowitz, Michael Snow, David Bierk and Jeffrey Spalding, were alternated with those by emerging artists – many of whom were still students at Emily Carr – such as the eight young artists who made up the landmark Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition by Scott Watson: “The Young Romantics” and the collective “Futura Bold”--- Grossmann, Gillmore, Lukacs and Root.

Diane Farris Gallery continues to play an important role in the Vancouver arts scene and internationally. The gallery wishes to thank all of the artists who have exhibited with them over the years and contributed to making Diane Farris Gallery a vibrant part of Canada’s visual arts community.

Globanmale Article

"At the Power Plant, the atmosphere is similarly promotional, but that's okay. The RBC Painting Competition has no pretensions to be otherwise. I found some great new (to me) artists here, including a second painting by Wil Murray (he's also in the MoCCA show) - a riotous, brilliantly coloured disembowelment of the painting surface aptly titled Sexe Maniac Maniac Maniac Maniac Maniac; the deftly asymmetrical hyperrealist painting of a shoe box by Lorenzo Pepito; and a rambunctious abstraction by Jeanie Riddle (who works as the director of Parisian Laundry in Montreal when she isn't hitting it out of the park in her studio): a giant, apparently friendly black blob consuming a dazzling canary-yellow pictorial field."

From Sarah Milroy's article in the Review section of the Globe and Mail today. Read the whole article here.

Security to aisle four. The Magenta Opening at MOCCA

Photo by Tim at BlogTO

See, that's my painting on the right(it's called "Broadcast TV's Gape Shot Or A Sad End To A Proud Life") at the Magenta Carte Blanche Vol. 2: Painting exhibition. That bit hanging is a paint skin, hung off a piece of foam. While securely attached at one end, it hangs free at the other.
Now imagine that space (MOCCA) with around 500 people in it. There were so many people there on Saturday at the opening. I'm shit for gauging crowds, but someone said 500, so I'll believe them.
There were so many people that everyone was getting awfully close to the work, with their back to it, drinking. They had to post a security guard next to my work, shooing people away from it so that they didn't knock bits off. I was delighted. My work had a bodyguard for the night.
That was a very good opening.
Go see the show, it is best show of Canadian painting I've ever seen, and Maryann Camilleri did a brilliant job with the book too.

"Why I Am Not A Painter" at Patrick Mikhail Gallery Opening November 21st

Why I Am Not A Painter
Wil Murray

November 19th to December 16th
Patrick Mikhail Gallery
2401 Bank Street Ottawa, ON

Opening Reception November 21st, 5:30pm - 9:00pm
(click on image above to view e-invite)

After being named runner-up by the Governor General in the 2008 RBC Painting Competition. After having work in both the Magenta Foundation's Carte Blanche Vol.2: Painting book and exhibition. After curating Painting: Thick and Thin at the Glenbow and the Illingworth Kerr. After spending much of the year painting, I am presenting my solo exhibition of new work, "Why I Am Not A Painter", at the Patrick Mikhail Gallery.
I've named this solo exhibition after Frank O'Hara's poem(below). I've named many of the paintings after really vulgar little-boy grafitti, any Foghorn Leghorn cartoons that feature the weasel, and my family lineage. I've made a whole clan around "Sexe Maniac Maniac Maniac Maniac Maniac", complete with dripping excretions, paint stamens, testicles and falsies. I've delicately folded paint skins like fabric and forced acrylic paint to grow in glazes and brush strokes. This year I’ve thought "That’ll photograph well" while painting and then gone blind.

Why I Am Not a Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

(1971)

Magenta Exhibition In Toronto

I'm headed down to Toronto tomorrow for the week. A few more RBC events, a little repair to a painting, but mostly for the launch of the Magenta Foundation's Carte Blanche Vol. 2: Painting book on the 15th of November.
Hope to see you there.
Click on the image above for the e-invite.

New Painting: Super Special Chat Twenty Dollars

Super Special Chat Twenty Dollars, 2008
Acrylic & Foam on Board, 35" X 47"