Editor’s Note: During the Cultural District launch celebration from 10 to 2 on Saturday, June 11, Brogan Joe Murphy’s work will be exhibited in the Gallery@FirstParish on the second floor of Bedford’s historic meeting house on Bedford Common. Using the Elm Street entrance, the building is fully accessible.
Brogan Joe Murphy is an artist who overcame a debilitating injury to create again.
After a botched operation left him paralyzed from the chest down in his late 50s, Murphy said, “I couldn’t even reach my easel. I had to hold the painting in my lap.”
His preferred media of oils and pastels were no longer realistic, he said. “Oils take a week to dry so if the painting is in your lap it’s going to be all over you. And I couldn’t get on top of the pastels.”
Yet Saturday at Bedford’s celebration of the town’s cultural district, Murphy will be the featured artist in the Gallery@FirstParish in the historic meeting house on Bedford Common.
He plans to show 14 pieces – “a range of things – some still-lifes, landscapes, a portrait I did of Walt Whitman.”
Murphy now has success with acrylics. Here’s how it happened. About four years ago, Murphy was on a boat ride for people in wheelchairs –the vessel was called The Impossible Dream.
“The captain said, ‘I hear you are an artist,’” Murphy recounted. The program had cut a sail into three-foot squares and was recruiting artists to donate their talents for a fundraising sail sale.
“I bought acrylic paint instead of oils and I really got into it,” he said. “Acrylics dry incredibly fast and they are every bit as archival as oils.”
“After I got used to this other medium I started painting again,” he related. “I was able to hold the canvas in my lap as I work. It is much more amenable to my situation. It took some getting used to, but I enjoy painting more than I used to because it takes my mind off other things.”
After growing up in Silver Spring, MD, Murphy majored in journalism at the University of Maryland. “But I wanted to study art,” he said.
Murphy began painting professionally at age 19, studying at the Atelier School of Classical Realism in Oakland, CA, and the techniques of its founder, David Hardy: “Very traditional painting methods and materials of the old masters – we made our own media. They taught me portraiture and still-life and the whole gamut.”
He ended up as the director of a large fine-art gallery in San Francisco, but “I got tired of selling other artists’ work and not having enough time to paint.”
Murphy’s wife grew up in Dracut, so they migrated to Massachusetts more than 20 years ago and lived in Bedford for a while. Murphy now is a Lowell resident.
In those days Murphy was a serious distance runner, but he injured his back in a California marathon and required two spinal fusion surgeries. The second one, 10 years ago, left him a paraplegic.
Now he serves as a volunteer at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital “as a peer mentor, to let them know the world hasn’t come to an end.”
Mike Rosenberg can be reached at [email protected], or 781-983-1763
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