Printmakers are a funny lot. I've always marvelled at their sub-specialty status in an art world that might wish to embrace them, not only for aesthetic reasons, but economic ones as well. That is to say, the work of very few living printmakers is out of the range of any art collector - and might easily be acquired by non-art collectors who are drawn to artist of subject for their own reasons. In a word, printmakers deserve better. It's as easy to collect prints as Star Wars memorabilia - and almost as cheap. Prints are fairly plentiful and only the most fastidious collector insists on an early "number." Most printmakers don't really give a damn about whether a collector owns 6/150 or the very last of the run. They are working artists for whom a check represents an opportunity to run out and make other images. Most have other jobs, work obsessively at their plates and drawing boards, and exhibit, mostly, with other printmakers. These unusually gallant people work in the shadow of the painters, sculptors, and video artists and don't seem to mind it.

Their sangfroid is commendable and might be emulated in other quarters.

Many of the best New York-area printmakers are represented in "Tides Lines: Prints of the Staten Island Waterfront" at the Noble Maritime Museum. I would like to take the opportunity to re-introduce
readers of this blog to one them.

My choice is entirely prejudicial and I would apologize for it if I thought it would do any good.
However, Bill Murphy is an artist whose steady, if fulsome, growth I have watched over the past fifteen years and I'm proud to have been able to look over his shoulder.

I met him at a gallery neither of us frequented - a co-op gallery in one of those fine old industrial buildings people were so crazy to live in twenty years ago. It had a roster of forgettable artists - a measure of honorable intentions: neither of us wanted to leave the area without seeing something, however mediocre.

The gallery was reached by a tortuous flight of stairs and had obviously been without visitors for a while.
If there had been a gallery sitter, he or she had absconded; we had the place entirely to ourselves. I don't remember the exhibit at all. Some co-op artists, then as now, deserve better too. It is a pity that the best of these are more or less blackballed (mostly by default) from commercial galleries that often promote lesser, but more saleable, talents. I think that's another reason why both of us hung in there. We identified with the people who were exhibiting in this gallery and other places like it - even if we were working feverishly to avoid their fate.

After taking a respectfully solitary tour of the exhibit, we retired to a coffee-shop where we started to compare thoughts. I was delighted (and relieved) to find another artist who didn't necessarily swoon at the mention of the smallish talents who were enjoying largish reputations at the time; intrigued by his independent-mindedness; cheerfully provoked by his resistance to some of my own half-baked notions about the world around whose peripheries both of us had little choice but to move.

I learned that Bill was from Staten Island - a place I identified with firemen and sanitation workers (a thing sadly borne out by the spate of funerals after
9/11.) He talked like a guy who might've strayed into business or real estate: a down-to-earth sort of guy whose more rarefied interests were tempered by a love of baseball that surpasses my own. To this day, he never fails to mention, in our emails, how the Mets are doing. (I boycott my home-team, the Nationals, because I would prefer to have fewer potholes on Capitol Hill than RKF Stadium spectator-crammed.) I told him that I'd seen some excellent drawings by him in a frame-shop on Lexington Avenue and wondered how he'd done with them there. (Hadn't done much, he
confessed.)

I would take him up on his invitation to visit his studio shortly afterwards. A word to the wise: it is best to go to Staten Island when you have an entire day at your disposal because it is an irresistible place to go for a five-hour walk. Even if you don't generally take walks like this, you will there.
Bill's mentor, John Noble, *walked around the place like mad and knew it better than anybody. His lithographs of the old waterfront life, with its moody infrastructure and proudly decaying tankers are among the most underrated bodies of work in the Twentieth Century. I would urge anyone for whom the genuinely romantic is not a despicable notion to look for the work of John Noble. His elegies to the world of "steam and sail" are poetic documents of a time that has - even on the Island itself - vanished completely.
Nor are they particularly expensive.

Like Noble, Bill has never seen any reason to leave Staten Island. He recently sold his citadel of a house in a marginal neighborhood and moved to another one - on the Island, of course! People know him there and are glad he's around - though he is not the art world celebrity it might be possible for him to be elsewhere. He teaches at Wagner College and is, I think, an esteemed and respected member of his profession. He's done a slew of portraits of college presidents, and will, no doubt, have done a complete set before too long. He's is as much part of his community as his Rutherford, New Jersey forebear, Dr.
William Carlos Williams.

I consider his artwork somewhat more subversive. His best prints are almost strident essays on our common mortality - he'll make a pile of old bricks in front of a big amusement park ride stand, in a symbolic sense, for all of us. He's accomplished, in a series of panoramic etchings, the nearly impossible: a sort of Staten Island timeline stretching back before human occupation to a our present era, in which man's imprint ranges everywhere - yet whether imprint exerts a benign, or malignant, effect is entirely up to the viewer. Bill records the notion of man as dangerous, however, in an intuitive way. His approach to a murky waterfront is marked not only by painstaking observation, but a lyrical steadfastness before which the less committed among us might stand aghast. His prints and watercolors of this once-teeming place accomplish the impossible in their capacity to illuminate the unseen while also - as Hopper said - sticking "to the fact." This dichotomy is also present in the work of Charles Meryon, the great French printmaker whose untimely death made a legend of his legend first, and his work second. This is unfortunate in that the work, in this case, was much greater than the man.

We rarely know our great artists when they're among us. They seem too ordinary; too approachable; "just folk," as it where. Do you think anybody ever gave a second thought to the round-shouldered man who spent so much time looking after The Globe Theatre? William Shakespeare was just a little guy who might've become an aldermen if he'd stayed in Stratford! Great. .
.but unremarkable? Inspired. . .but inconspicuous?
In Bill's case, these contradictions are mostly true.
He wouldn't give up his life as father and homeowner easily and, at present, nobody's asking him to. He hasn't finished with Staten Island as a place to watch
- though he's ventured into New Jersey lately - the scene of one of his best recent prints. Also into Coney Island, which is somehow as connected to Staten Island as it is to Brooklyn - where he sets up his easel often. Yet Staten Island is the staging-area for most everything Bill does and, like Constable's
soggy Deptford, is more than place enough for him.



* Bill remembers Noble differently. I will quote him.
"Sorta doubtful. he knew the old industrial area (Richmond Terrace) and how to gget to the Paramount Bar and Grill to Demyan's Hofbrau to Bayonne and his studio."