If no symbolic system unites Murphy's pictures, certain of them at least evince rudimentary references. The most obvious such references, logically enough, are those "identified" with brief (if often large) written phrases, some incomplete. Such phrases appear in a few of the paintings or in similarly few of Murphy's drawings. To date, the works marked with such writing concern the most (perhaps the only) concrete of the artist's thematic concerns: Romulus.

Peter Frank
Los Angeles, 1993
Murphy conjures the legendary founder of the ancient city (and state) of Rome with oblique suggestions of classical statuary and slightly less indirect references to Romulus' origin.

Peter Frank
Los Angeles, 1993
No great interpretive leap must be sustained between the seated, draped figure holding two balls or round fruits together before...her? him? The person is actually male, but appears sexually indistinct. The orbs (especially held as they are) mimic a woman's breast; otherwise, they connote male genitalia and as well suggest the overall concept of twinning.

Peter Frank
Los Angeles, 1993
if we understand the citation of Romulus as evocation of a civilization itself sunk deep into the recesses of history - and yet still firing the core of our own culture .-we see that Murphy's Roman references are not at all gratuitous. They weigh on our own situation, both that of America as a whole and that of one region in particular.

Peter Frank
Los Angeles, 1993
By indicating that the United States is today's Rome, trying to impose a global Pax Americana, Murphy simply affirms a comprehension at which most of the world has already arrived. But that now.- facile construct contains a more touching one in a kind of reverse synecdoche: if America as a whole recapitulates Rome at its height, Rome at either end of its history ---its Greco-Estruscan seed, couched in animist legend, and its decline and fall, the decadence fiddling while barbarians clamored at the gates—- spurs comparison with America's Southeast, the one region of the country (so far) to have undergone a true political and cultural eclipse.

Peter Frank
Los Angeles, 1993
By indicating that the United States is today's Rome, trying to impose a global Pax Americana, Murphy simply affirms a comprehension at which most of the world has already arrived. But that now.- facile construct contains a more touching one in a kind of reverse synecdoche:

Peter Frank
Los Angeles, 1993
if America as a whole recapitulates Rome at its height, Rome at either end of its history ---its Greco-Estruscan seed, couched in animist legend, and its decline and fall, the decadence fiddling while barbarians clamored at the gates—- spurs comparison with America's Southeast, the one region of the country (so far) to have undergone a true political and cultural eclipse.

Peter Frank
Los Angeles, 1993
if America as a whole recapitulates Rome at its height, Rome at either end of its history ---its Greco-Estruscan seed, couched in animist legend, and its decline and fall, the decadence fiddling while barbarians clamored at the gates

Peter Frank
Los Angeles, 1993
It should be observed, however, that by employing sometimes sexually ambiguous figures, Murphy implicitly turns bigotry on its head, making the victim by nature reflective of his or her tormentor.

Peter Frank
Los Angeles, 1993
In literary terms the vividness of Murphy's imagery might suggest the Magic Realists, but its pathos, its sense of isolation, of quiet desperation, of pleasure taken from minute things, all echoes Beckett's angst -an angst born of something else besides mere misfortune.

Peter Frank
Los Angeles, 1993
He does not render his images with these media, but creates with them both the pervading illusive atmosphere, with its inference of recessional space, and the elements which admit and even emphasize the artifice of the entire picture. This artifice plays off, but never negates, the images, which, it turns out, are sources in a whole different artificial means: photography.

Peter Frank
Los Angeles, 1993

Murphy conjures the legendary founder of the ancient city (and state) of Rome with oblique suggestions of classical statuary and slightly less indirect references to Romulus' origin.

By indicating that the United States is today's Rome, trying to impose a global Pax Americana, Murphy simply affirms a comprehension at which most of the world has already arrived. But that now.- facile construct contains a more touching one in a kind of reverse synecdoche:

if America as a whole recapitulates Rome at its height, Rome at either end of its history ---its Greco-Estruscan seed, couched in animist legend, and its decline and fall, the decadence fiddling while barbarians clamored at the gates

It should be observed, however, that by employing sometimes sexually ambiguous figures, Murphy implicitly turns bigotry on its head, making the victim by nature reflective of his or her tormentor.

In literary terms the vividness of Murphy's imagery might suggest the Magic Realists, but its pathos, its sense of isolation, of quiet desperation, of pleasure taken from minute things, all echoes Beckett's angst -an angst born of something else besides mere misfortune.

TODD MURPHY (1962-2020)