Dugald Murray

Yellow #2

101 × 152 cm

Oil on canvas

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About the work

Yellow #2 is a diptych that lets yellow take over almost completely, then tests how far it can be pushed before it fractures. I painted it in the moment, without a fixed image in mind, following how the colour spread, slipped and stalled across the two panels.

The dense, worked yellow sits against scrubbed greys and a single, drifting cloud of violet-blue, so the painting holds both saturation and quiet at once. The work is an exploration of harmony and interruption, where each adjustment is a response to what is already there rather than a move toward a planned end point.

About the artist

Dugald Murray is a Melbourne-based oil painter whose abstract works explore personal introspection through a constrained alla prima approach. Influenced by a multicultural childhood across Iraq, Indonesia, Europe, and Australia, Dugald employs restricted palettes and brushes, eliminating interferences to focus purely on on-canvas exploration. His practice oscillates between thick impasto textures and flowing, thinned oil applications, creating works that capture the dialogue between internal states and external resilience. Through gestural mark-making and self-observation, Dugald invites viewers to connect with emotions woven into vibrant, textured surfaces. Dugald Murray is an oil painter whose works explore the intersection of the seen and the felt. Though his artistic journey began with landscape and portrait photography, Dugald has since transitioned to a more abstract expression, utilising heavily thinned oil paints and his own pigment blocks to deconstruct and reimagine the emotional core of those early subjects.

Colour and texture play a pivotal role in Dugald’s work, while the use of mediums mandates immediate and permanent reflection of emotional connection between artist, pigment and surface. These elements serve as bridges, connecting the visual world captured in photography with the artist's personal response. The resulting paintings are not mere replications, but rather explorations of the essence of a place or person, translated through a lens of emotion and abstraction.

Having come to painting later in life, Dugald brings a passion for artistic discovery. His work invites viewers to delve deeper, to connect with the emotions woven into the vibrant colours and textured surfaces, and to discover their own interpretations within the abstract.

This focus on the emotional resonance translates into the artist's abstract style. By deconstructing the visual elements and focusing on colour and texture, Dugald seeks to capture the unseen forces, energies, and stories that lie beneath the surface.

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