10-Minute Challenge: ‘Canopy’ – The New York Times

Thanks for spending some time with the painting! If you want to spend more time with the art, just scroll back up.

Now, we’ll tell you a little about it. Our guide today is Catherine Murphy — the painter herself.

To Ms. Murphy, getting people to engage with art for long periods is no weekly experiment.

“You know, a long time ago in the ’70s, I decided people looked at paintings too quickly,” she said. “And the whole point of so many years for me was: Let’s slow people down a little bit.”

In her work, she told us that she tries to get people to slow down in two ways.

First, her paintings must be beautiful. Her job, she said, is to keep going until the painting is working — until it will stop somebody.

(This worked on us. We saw Ms. Murphy’s work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her painting of a blue blanket in the grass stopped us right in our tracks.)

“I never paint ugly,” she said. “Even if it’s an ugly thing, like buckets from Home Depot, the painting is beautiful.”

Second, she said she always tries to give the viewer something to figure out — something to get them to say: What am I looking at? Why am I looking at it?

When you first saw the painting, you might have thought it was a photograph. Look closer, though, and you’ll see it’s not. “I do not make it look like a painting,” she said. “I want it to look like something that is part of life.”

She’s done this with dresses:

With garden hoses (look closely!):

With yards:

And she did it with plastic buckets — the painting you just spent some time with.

Ms. Murphy, 78, paints things that she sees in front of her, as opposed to painting from a photograph or other reference material. When she constructs outdoor scenes, she tries to paint them at the same time each day, in as close to the same light as she can get, for however long it takes.

(It took seven summers to complete the yard scene above. “Really eight, but I took one off in the middle because I thought I was going to go mad.”)

Ms. Murphy constructed the outdoor scene for “Canopy” in her yard.

When it comes to focus, Ms. Murphy is a champion.

“If you go outside every single day, you finally become aware of everything that’s in front of you,” she said. “The whole painting is about life size, a five-foot-by-five-foot patch of ground, so I’m going to see everything on that.”

In the end, it took her more than two years to complete: two full summers of sunny mornings, three hours at a time.

The canopy changed seemingly every moment, she said. One minute the light would hit the branches and create reflections in the buckets. A moment later, the reflections would be gone.

For months, she would focus, mix color, paint and wait — for the light to hit just one part, one small square on the floor of the woods, just right.

“Every increment of space of these buckets has been considered,” she said. “It’s a real pain to work in this way, but it’s fabulous at the same time.”

The buckets got moldy. The grass, shadowed by the buckets, kept dying, so her assistants would replant grass from other parts of the yard and clean the mold and replace the water.

She spent the whole first summer just trying to get the perspective on the tops of the buckets right — searching for the right ellipse shape — working them out in drawings and on the canvas.

Though the buckets are circular in life, on the canvas, their shapes have to bend and stretch and arc to create a realistic illusion.

“The ellipses are not according to any system,” she added. “I’m not setting up a perspective grid or anything. They really are instinctual. So, when the ellipse is right, the ellipse is right.”

She cursed them, looking, trying, erasing, looking again. She asked her friends. “I had people come to help me, and tell me how this ellipse is wrong,” she said. “Nobody could.”

She made appeals to the higher painting gods: “I kept on saying, ‘Cézanne, where are you when I need you?’”

Once finally settled in place, those ellipses become frames for the messy reflections they hold. These mini-abstract compositions are each colored by their containers.

The pure, primary colors of these Home Depot buckets aren’t all that common in nature; she’s plopped a collection of artificial objects onto a bed of grass, one of the most natural places of all. That tension between the artificial and the natural sets up what she calls an “argument” in the painting. All of those elements are speaking to one another.

It’s her job as a painter to work within and between those elements, she said. She doesn’t want individual details to stand out. She’s looking for harmony between all the elements in the painting.

Take a look at it again with that in mind.

Near the end of our conversation, we asked Ms. Murphy why she still paints this way after all these years. Why deal with the dying grass, the ever-changing light, those impossible ellipses, morning after morning after morning?

“Honestly, when everything is right, I mean, birds have landed on my hat a whole bunch of times just because I’m there and I’m still,” she said. “And I’m somehow part of everything.”