Although she never identifies it in the titles of her paintings, Nina Murdoch constantly returns to a mysterious, shadowy place in Battersea. Here, gazing at a road dominated by heavy bridges and the insistent din of unseen London traffic, she finds herself mesmerised. Street kids who hang out in this grimy locale look at her uneasily, suspecting that she might be an undercover police officer. But Murdoch does not feel threatened. She is, after all, a Londoner from birth, and feels profoundly attached to the city’s history. And the ever-shifting light means that, each time she revisits her Battersea haunt, it looks different. This unpredictability lies at the centre of her involvement with a place many people might well find unprepossessing or frankly ominous. Even so, Murdoch is not a topographical artist. Spurning all thought of illustration, she concentrates instead on the authenticity of her emotional response to the scene. When asleep, she often feels that whole cities fill her head with their inexhaustible urban complexity. And in the studio, where Murdoch habitually works at night, she prefers to work fast – painting over what she has done before and refusing to think too much about fidelity to the outward appearance of her chosen setting.
Her decision to work in egg on gesso panels might suggest a technical obsession with archaic techniques perfected as long ago as the fifteenth century. But it would be a mistake to conclude that Murdoch is an artist preoccupied with the past. While admiring Uccello’s perpetual play with perspectival space and the rhythmic patterns running through it, she thrives on a heretical attitude to working methods. Making it up rather than relying on rules of any kind, she favours unusually large brushes, an abundance of water and a liberal use of sandpaper.

Determined above all to arrive at the essence of things, she strips away everything that might threaten to impede access to fundamentals. Hence, no doubt, the increasingly abstract character of her work. She aims at conveying a sense of flux in the paint itself, and wants the final image to feel like a moment. In her earlier work, Murdoch used to depict figures inhabiting landscapes. But they gradually became more like ghosts, and lost their former importance. Although she still feels they are present in her work, these elusive people have somehow passed by. Walking around the Battersea location, she imagines what might have happened there and, at times, feels melancholy about the fact that they have gone.

 
 
This deep-seated awareness of mortality plays an important role in Murdoch’s art. She tries to create an embedded awareness of history within her mark-making, even though photographs of the setting supply an initial structure when painting commences. Gradually, the intensity of her emotional involvement with the place emerges – and yet, by a paradox, she also wants her work to be very physical. Her grandparents and uncles were all architects, and Murdoch has inherited a fascination with the sculptural presence of buildings. But she is equally drawn to rocks affected by tidal erosion on the seashore, and her own paintings are charged with a simultaneous consciousness of decay and survival. That is why her images are so potent. A nightmarish alienation coexists with a seductive apprehension of light. At once menacing and luminous, Murdoch’s art reflects the ambivalence running through our own response to the lonely allure of urban existence.

Richard Cork