Jemima Murphy’s Eden begins with the pleasure of a garden. Seen closer, its bloom becomes a question of paint under load: oil thickening, loosening, and descending until the flowers become the trace of their own fall.
The garden arrives as a wall.
In Untamed Garden, rose and dark foliage press forward with the force of something seen too close, the way a hedge fills the whole window when you stand against it. Pinks knot and double back through greens that have gone almost black in places, and the surface is dense with the particular generosity of oil: every mark sitting up off the linen, catching light along its ridge. It is a beautiful painting in the least complicated sense. It offers bloom, weight, colour, and the pleasure of looking at a thing that has more in it than the eye can sort. There is no reason to look at it as anything other than what it appears to be.
