Wagner art professor Bill Murphy profiled in magazine

            Wagner College art professor Bill Murphy is one of four “emerging artists” (“Imagine that, at my age!” quipped the 56-year-old professor) featured in the Spring Collectors Sourcebook, a separate magazine packaged with the March issue of Art and Antiques Magazine:

            Bill Murphy’s drawings of the Staten Island waterfront reflect not a preoccupation with preserving the past for its own sake, but a deep curiosity about the nature of decay. “Sometimes people are turned off by the element or decay or decomposition, but to me this is the natural order of everything in the universe,” he says. “Things slowly decay in one way or another and are changed into something else.”

            And yet the 56-year-old artist’s recent show, “Undead: A Eulogy to the Staten Island Waterfront,” at Staten Island’s Wagner College Gallery, might well be considered an act of preservation, however unintended. These etchings, watercolors and pencil drawings, after all, preserve a hidden, often beautiful side of the ever-changing waterfront Murphy has explored for the past 30 years. His pencil studies reveal the bare timbers of wrecked 19th century barges emerging at low tide like the bones of ancient sea monsters. His panoramic watercolors, some nearly 11 feet wide but just over 2 feet tall, beckon to be read from left to right, like rich, detailed texts. Not that this versatile artist focuses solely on his hometown. His oeuvre includes portraits, metaphorical still lifes, cityscapes, mixed-media collages and more. The works range in price from $250 for etchings and lithographs to $7,000 for large-scale panoramic watercolors. “When it comes to subject matter, I believe in the nonlinear thought process,” Murphy says. “I just follow my intuition.”