Iowa Heritage Digital Collections
State Library of Iowa

Blue 1

Blue 1

Title

Blue 1

Description

Therese Murdza is a painter, born and raised in Edgewood, Maryland and received her B.S. in Theater from Towson University in 1986. She works with acrylic and/or oil paint on stretched canvas, using pencil and water-based crayons to mark maps, make records and add line. The swaths and blobs of color and breakdown of image become music, are not music, perform within their frame, push the limits, and fly beyond it.
Therese has this to say about her process,"Before I could tie my shoes, I played a small accordion...I studied piano and saxophone and then jazz and music theory in a music program my dad built at an otherwise limited public high school. And then, in college, I put down the instruments and took myself to the theatre, to new forms of moving, composing and materializing sounds in transitory space...After graduating in 1986, I distilled this playwriting into the efficiency of poetry. I found a welcomed pause in the quiet of the words on paper, whittling down the images and the bodies and emotions into as few words as possible...A move back to the city had me drawing on big paper and literally taking the words apart. Disintegrating the shapes of the words into lines. Freeing the movement to create energy there on the page, into the squares and out of the circles. I began painting images and concepts using elements--those circles and blobs and squares and moving lines--that I"m still exploring. I work on my own, influenced by a vibrant community of artists and activists, to paint the unpredictable musical form, the movement of bodies and words, the paragraphs and stories and sounds set free. It is this movement that I push into color and shape, both framed and unfettered."

Creator

Murdza, Therese

Publisher

University of Iowa. School of Art and Art History

Date

2004
2005-09-23

Rights

Digital collection © The University of Iowa. All works are copyright the individual artist.

Relation

The Daily Palette Digital Collection
Visual Arts
http://dailypalette.uiowa.edu/?artwork=620

Format

24
28
acrylic paint, pencil, water crayon on canvas

Type

Still image
Acrylic paintings (Visual works); Acrylic painting (Technique); Graphite pencils; Crayons (Drawing material)

Identifier

09232005.jpg
183409339
https://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/