Popular local artist featured in exhibit at The Art Museum of Eastern Idaho
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IDAHO FALLS The Art Museum of Eastern Idaho in Idaho Falls is currently hosting an exhibit featuring the work of award-winning Pocatello-based artist Torgesen Murdock.
Murdock, an Idaho native, has been painting and drawing for over forty years. Her paintings are noted for their use of bold brushstrokes and color and adorn the walls of businesses throughout the West. She has also been featured in “International Arts Magazine,” with her painting winning the magazine’s 2014 International Landscape Grand Prize, among others.
“I’ve been at this for a long time,” Murdock told EastIdahoNews.com. “I’ve sold (paintings) to a lot of businesses in Pocatello, Idaho Falls, Rexburg – that area. BYU-I owns several. I have paintings all over the place.”
Murdock’s artistic journey began in her youth growing up on a ranch in Soda Springs.
“My dad had cattle and grain and I grew up with horses,” Murdock said. “Even though (Dad) would hire people who had children, I had a lot of alone time. So I drew. I loved to draw and all through high school, I was asked to do the murals for the Senior Ball and all of that kind of stuff.”
Murdock said her early efforts in painting came under somewhat unusual circumstances.
“Unlike most schools, Soda Springs didn’t really run an art program,” she said. “When I was a senior in high school, we approached the P.E. teacher and asked if she would teach us an art course. So the first paintings I painted came under the tutelage of a P.E. teacher.”
After high school, Murdock earned her Bachelor’s Degree from Utah State University and a Master’s Degree from Brigham Young University. Her education gave her an opportunity to develop her own style.
“I’m very experimental,” she said. “I love to experiment with oils and with watercolor and see what I can generate in an experimental sense. To sell art in the western states, they like it to be a little more traditional, so I kind of have to walk that line.”
Murdock says that while she loves painting portraits and still lifes, painting landscapes allows her to apply a more experimental approach to her art.
“I’ve taken a lot of pictures of all these different (landscapes),” she said. “I never paint a landscape just based off one picture. I might take ten pictures I have of a waterfall or a scene in a specific area and then that’s what I go from. My landscapes might have five or six layers, of washes and glazing and that kind of stuff.”
Murdock’s painting style was also impacted by the trip she and three other artists took to St. Petersburg, Russia in 2002. She studied for several weeks under Russian impressionist Igor Vadimovich Petrov at the Repin Academie, one of the country’s most highly-respected institutes of higher learning.
“Russian impressionism is load your brush with a lot of heavy paint and get it on (the canvas),” she said. “My paintings have taken a lot from Russian impressionism. I use more heavy brushstrokes, not so much blending, not so ‘every hair on the dog.’ I don’t really like ‘every hair on the dog,’ which mean very detailed. I like (my paintings) to be impressionistic to give you a feel of a place or the sense of a person.”
You can check out Torgesen Murdock’s Signature Show now through March 25 at The Art Museum of Eastern Idaho. Click here to visit Murdock’s website where you can learn more about the artist, her work, and other places where you can see her paintings.
