ALISSA MURPHY
About the Artist
My name is Alissa Murphy. I am a senior at The University of Texas at Austin studying Biology (Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior) with a Studio Art minor. I work with hyperrealism, nature photography and oil painting to capture the character and essence of my subjects as I see them. My approach to each medium is similar; I want to communicate my way of seeing and experiencing the world through art.
Portraiture
Inspired by my mother's creativity and a house overflowing with art supplies, I started creating art in early childhood. In late middle school, a teacher introduced me to drawing with a grid system, creating two grids, one on a printed photograph and an identical one on a blank paper, and then working square by square to copy the image. I was hooked by the process. Nine years and thousands of hours later, I now work capturing high levels of detail with a grid as small as ⅛ of an inch. With this system I primarily focus on portraiture. What a challenge it is to capture someone so perfectly on paper! To capture every detail of their being and truly describe their presence and essence tickles my brain in a way I can't describe.
Photography
During my second year of college, I enrolled in a film photography class, and fell in love with another process driven medium. I had planned to expand my skills in portraiture creating reference images for my drawings, but photographing the places I travel to rock climb distracted me. Similar to my work in portraiture, I endeavor to represent the character of a place. How do I see a place? How can I capture my experience of a space and communicate that through photographs? Can a cohesive series of images express the way I see the world? I've worked to capture this essence in a number of places I’ve returned to across seasons, making a cohesive series using primarily 35mm and 4x5 film.
Oil painting
In 2025, I spent four months in Aix-en-Provence, France attending the International American University Marchutz art program. The Marchutz program teaches students how to see. We started the program by copying master's drawings and paintings to develop an intuition for observation. We then moved to painting live models, learning how to describe forms in patches of color. Then we shifted to still lifes, painting fruits and flowers as they decayed and transformed over time. We finished with plein air painting in the countryside outside of Aix, and in Venice where we spent a week capturing the light of the city. I could write pages on what I learned about vision. I began to see the world as patches of light and color, to capture the essence of something with only the necessary strokes, to see the whole of something and paint it all at once, to allow it to grow into itself. For the first time, I worked extensively from life rather than photographs which, similar to my landscape photography and portraiture, allowed me to find a way to share my unique way of seeing the world around me.
Additionally, I devoted much of my time in France to being an artist. How lucky to have so much time to sit and look and think and create. Art “… is something in which the whole personality takes part – the conscious as well as the unconscious mind. Art is the habit of the artist and habits have to be rooted deep in the personality.” - Flannery O’Connor
