Bill Murphy Santa Fe Collection

Bill Murphy began an art career as a cartoonist for Playboy and Esquire. He was a graphic designer of bookcovers and posters and an illustrator for Grove Press, Simon & Schuster, Delacorte, etc. He produced educational films for the American Medical Association and Xerox Learning Systems. He followed his dream by moving to New Mexico to paint and draw the landscape. With remarkable and passionate responsiveness to the world he inhabits, Bill Murphy - intrigued by the strange beauty of the high rugged desert around hi home and city - suddenly began to draw a landscape of cliffs and mesas carved by arroyos, dotted with pinon and juniper trees, pungent with sage and chamisa bushes, illuminated by New Mexico's heavenly sun and the clouds' caressing shadows. "As soon as the idea came, I had to do it. To try and capture Santa Fe's setting - one of the world's great panoramas." With a hand as precise as lightning in the tremendous sky above the mountains, Bill Murphy creates desert portraits, expressing a magnificent mystery.