Jan Murphy Gallery is delighted to present The moon’s raining, an online exhibition by Tim Price.
“I’ve been painting everyday things from around the city. Ordinary moments drift into view while I’m walking, a plane flying in over the buildings and trees, flowers growing in the suburbs. They feel meaningful and beautiful without having an obvious reason why. One of the wonderful things about being alive is finding magic in the everyday. In the same way someone might buy a lottery ticket or watch the footy for a bit of excitement, I stop to look at flowers in the suburbs.
I love walking around looking at things and daydreaming. What I see and what I think become intertwined. I casually reminisce or project into the future. I imagine I know who or what I’m looking at, reading status, history or culture into the people and places around me. But really, in today’s world, everything is ambiguous and mysterious.
It only takes a few seconds to notice something and enjoy it, but a painting can take months, sometimes years, to make. Unlike a photograph, it isn’t a single moment in time. Because I paint from memory, I’m never painting just one thing, but many memories that gather into a single image. The finished painting is only the visible tip of an iceberg of perceptions, thoughts and experiences that have gone into making it.
Painting from memory isn’t about replicating an original experience. Memory, combined with the act of painting, creates something entirely new. When I’m in the studio painting what I’ve seen, the experience transforms. I begin with memory, but the painting starts to have a life of its own. Colour and mark-making become their own living experience. A painting exists in real life and real time.
The colours, shapes, textures and compositions I choose all resonate with different parts of my life. On the surface, a painting of a bird might simply depict a bird sitting on a fence. But the blue of the sky, the layers of paint within the bird, the shapes in the fence, all connect to memories, experiences and ways of seeing that extend far beyond that single image.
I want my paintings to come alive, for the things within them to feel solid and full of life, though not through pristine realism. It happens through colour relationships, spatial illusion, the dynamism of shapes, the liveliness of the mark-making and the layering of paint. Every varied mark on the canvas has been made by my emotional and thinking body, through the simple pleasure of painting.”
— Tim Price, 2026
