Paul Murphy

Chief Painter @British Council

Belfast, GB

I worked as a self-employed figure painter from the age of 5 but only realised that I could sell the painted figures when I was much older than 5 but in that time I perfected my art. Later on I got the bug for painting proper and launched out on a solo career which might be described as the \'shit or bust\' school of painting or drawing. Basically I was going to go down in flames or be shot dead in a cornfield but paint out everything I felt and thought before that moment actually came. I travelled across the European continent and could be found in galleries or museums, amazingly survived and sold a few works on the way, to Italian dealers, cafes, to the Glyptothek in Munich, a museum of antiquities, to farmers in the Bavarian countryside. I met another artist in Munich, Alexander Roth, and we found yet another artist, Martha Hartl an architect, who lived in the countryside near Rohrbach. Alexander lived nr Goetheplatz, a fashionable part of Munich and had rich friends in Schwabing, a fashionable hood and former Bohemia, but today a shadow of its former self. I sold my work Junge mit Gans to Herr Schwann at the Glyptothek and a big canvas to a sushi bar in Schwabing. Like the former Expressionists such as Franz Marc, Wassily Kandinsky, Gabriele Munter etc I wrote poems about my paintings, this is a very German thing, to be a tausendtassa, jack of all trades but master of none.