Yifang Zheng
Since I came to school in London, I have visited the gallery almost every week. The painter I saw recently in the Lyndsey Ingram gallery, Suzy Murphy, has given me a very strong impression and a lot of inspiration.
Why I have such a strong resonance with her works may be mainly because she is a bit like me. First of all, from the perspective of painting, we have drawn a lot of trees and branches, a lot of landscape paintings, and a strange little thing often appears in the paintings. In her paintings, it is a triangular object like a small tent, and in my paintings, it is an island formed by the deformation of human body. And I think her paintings convey a similar mood to mine.
On the other hand, her ideas are also very similar to mine. I saw a paragraph that was printed on the glass gate of the gallery about what she said.
‘These are all self-portraits. I really don’t see them as landscapes,’ says Murphy. ‘They are just me using the land as a dialogue of what I feel. They represent my internal landscape. They are things and places I’ve experienced and passed through. But because I paint from memory, I only remember a place in the way I encountered it emotionally. I talk a lot about memory in my work.’
Another artist who inspired me is Freud. I think I don't need to talk about his works any more, he is so famous. I've been looking at his paintings for a long time. His paintings have their own characteristics in composition. They have always been the object of my research on composition and have a great impact on me. But what I want to say this time is not the same as before. I went to RA to see Freud's exhibition, which is the work of his whole career at all stages. Looking at all the paintings, I found that his early style and his old style are far from each other. It has changed so much. To be honest, I can't see that this is the painting made from one person if there is nobody tell me. His exhibition once again reminded me not to be constrained by the style. Artists should not be too concerned about how to find their own style or be afraid of changing it. I will always remember this sentence.