Cork artist Colm Murphy: Nature has the smarts, not AI
Colm Murphy and his painting Pocaire Gaoithe.
Colm Murphy is an artist of the natural world. His watercolour paintings are highly detailed and lavishly coloured, and most are inspired by the birdlife and fish he encounters on his walks and angling trips all over the country.
At least 35 paintings will feature in Murphy’s new exhibition at St Peter’s on North Main St in Cork, which will be opened on the evening of Thursday April 16 by the Reverend Gary Hastings, former Archdeacon of Tuam and Rector of Galway, and a noted Irish language enthusiast.
“I’ve known Gary for years,” says Murphy. “He’s about seven feet tall, and he plays the flute. He’s a nice safe pair of hands. There's nothing worse than big, long, boring speeches, but Gary will be grand. We'll have a bit of craic.”
Murphy’s love of the outdoors was encouraged by his father, the celebrated sculptor Séamus, who brought him on long walks in his childhood. He took up fly fishing early, and speaks movingly of the beauty of places such as Lough Currane in Waterville, Co Kerry, long famous for its sea trout and salmon.
“There’s a strain of sea trout that’s unique to Lough Currane and the river system going up to the three lakes above it. They’re the biggest sea trout in the country,” he says. “But Lough Currane itself is amazing.
"There’s an old monastery on Church Island, and a causeway running out to it that’s five feet underwater. You wouldn’t even know it’s there, but the monks were able to walk out to the island, with the water up to their chests.”
Like many, Murphy bemoans the decline in the sea trout and wild salmon populations. “The salmon are fucked because there’s no krill or eels in the sea for them to feed on,” he says. “They’re all being hoovered up for fertiliser. I mean, there’s thousands of square kilometres of dead ocean out there now that sustains nothing.
“Even the mackerel are endangered. They used to come up as far as the Opera House in Cork. There were so many, they’d force each other up the river, and you could catch them off Patrick’s Bridge.”
He has noticed a similar decline in birdlife. “There's species dying off all the time,” he says. “And what I'm trying to do is record them. Not that there's anything new in what I'm doing, but it's just to say, here, look, this is what we have.
"There are really complex things going on with birds, to do with the weather and the climate. I often think about the species coming and going, the chaffinches that arrive in Ireland in the winter, and others that leave for Spain. When you think of all the hoo-ha over immigration… birds are doing it all the time.”
He sees an intelligence at work in the natural world that is a far cry from the AI slop he finds himself being confronted with daily. “Someone just sent me an AI-generated video of a cat frying an egg,” he says.
“I hate anthropomorphism anyway, but it’s like, have they anything better to do with their time? We have this universe, a system that works fine, or would do but for our interference. But now we have AI condensing our intelligence – or our alleged intelligence anyway – and it’s supposedly going to do everything for us, but it feels like it’s just coalescing all our mistakes.
“That’s why I’m painting these pictures, to remark on what we had. The salmon of knowledge. The wise old owl. The ravens. They had the smarts. I found a fantastic quote from Leonardo da Vinci: ‘Human ingenuity may devise various inventions, but it will never devise anything more beautiful, nor more simple, nor more to the purpose than nature does.’”
Prices for Murphy's pieces at the exhibition will be in the region of €1,600.
Murphy lived on the Sheep’s Head peninsula in West Cork for many years, but these days, he is back in the house he grew up in on Wellesley Terrace, off Wellington Road in Cork city. The living room he uses as his studio is full of his father’s work and that of his maternal grandfather, the sculptor Joseph Higgins.
The place has a long cultural history. “My parents moved in in 1945,” says Murphy. “Before that, the composer Aloys Fleischmann had lived here with his family.”
Murphy’s father Séamus was not his only influence as an artist. He also learned much from his mother Maigreád, an art teacher who helped found Cork Arts Society and its associated gallery, the Lavit, which is still thriving today.
Growing up in the 1960s and ’70s, he was just as interested in music as he was in the visual arts, he says. “Rory Gallagher’s mother lived down the road here. I’d often pass him in the street when he was home for Christmas and we’d say hello. His concerts at City Hall were magical.”
Murphy turned to traditional music himself. He mastered the bodhrán, and played with the folk legends Dé Danann from 1988 up to their dissolution in 2003, featuring on albums such as and , and touring all over the world.
He has also recorded and performed with the likes of the late Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, Máirtín O’Connor and Altan, and has worked as a tutor with the School of Music, UCC.
“I still do bits and pieces,” he says now. “I do a bit of recording, and I’m playing with Breanndán Begley and Cáit Ní Riain at the Michael O’Dwyer Festival in Allihies in June. I’m really looking forward to that.”
There are, of course, correlations between his love of music and his interest in birdlife. One of his favourite stories concerns Amadeus Mozart and his pet starling.
“One day,” he says, “Mozart was walking down the street in Vienna. He was in the middle of composing a piano concerto, and the next thing he heard somebody whistling part of it down the road. He couldn't believe it. How could anyone know the melody?
"When he ran down the road, he realised the whistling was coming from a pet shop he had visited before. So he went in, and there was a starling in a cage, and when the starling saw him, it whistled the melody back at him again.
“Mozart realised that when he had been in the pet shop before, he must have been humming the melody, and the starling had picked up on it. Anyway, he bought the starling and brought it home. He kept it as a pet for three years, and he gave it a huge funeral when it died.
"When you think of Mozart’s starling’s intelligence as opposed to AI… that's wisdom, isn’t it?”
- An Exhibition of New Paintings by Colm Murphy runs at St Peter’s on North Main St, Cork from April 16–25. Further information: stpeterscork.ie
