Arthur Murch
Leda
I’ve spent a lot of time around Arthur Murch’s works. They filled the house of Michelle Murch, Arthur’s daughter. Michelle and her partner Walter are like a second set of parents to me. I fell in love with their daughter in my teens and frequently ended up at their house. The time spent there helped me form a sense of what life as an artist might be.
Arthur worked in a time when being an artist also meant being a craftsperson. It was simple necessity. Michelle kept around not only finished works but also incomplete pieces – beautiful plaster studies, bronze test pours and sketches on browning paper.
Leda is, of course, a reference to Grecian myth, a vein of history that’s now made it into my own work. Arthur painted it in London just before the outbreak of WWII and, when the Murch family fled, it spent the entire war there. It was brought to Australia in the late 1940s and purchased by the AGNSW in 1976.