On the Table

Walter Murch is a man who loves to work at night, painting floodlit still lifes in a shadowy studio. "Sometimes I'll knock off to raid the icebox," he says, "but when I'm working I'm liable to forget the time altogether. Between the emotional kick and the visual kick, I feel suspended."

Murch's paintings, on view in a Manhattan gallery last week, had all the dim, cold calm of false dawn. They were done with dead-eye accuracy, in greenish gobs of shadow laced with silvery threads and buttons of light. He had put the paint on thickly, Murch explained, because "that helps create a thing out of the painting itself." Among his table-top subjects were a dead bird, a dead fish poised on a clinker, an ancient phonograph, and assorted eggs, lemons and potatoes.

An affable, heavyset man of 41, Murch paints covers for FORTUNE and occasional portraits for friends, but his heart is in his still lifes. He once had a daytime studio, "but I did no work in it. There seemed to be a lot of light . . ." Nowadays he works only at night, in a small room of the Riverside Drive apartment he shares with his wife and five-year-old son.

"I may not go out of doors for a week at a time," Murch says. "Then I'll take a walk and look around vaguely for something to paint. The other day I found a dog's head at a taxidermist's. It was a fox terrier mounted on the wall like a moose." He generally finds what he is looking for in shop windows: "For instance that fish in the show. I'd been wanting to do a fish for years but there were practical difficulties, you might say. This one was smoked. It lasted over a week and a half and hardly sagged at all--no more than an eighth of an inch. Draperies will move faster than that, you know, even in a very quiet atmosphere."

Does he use measurements to paint by? "Oh, no. I use this eye mostly [pointing to his left one] and I hold my head in one spot, like a camera, instead of ducking it around. That may sound a bit rigid, but I think craftsmanship should be uppermost. You build the picture up, very faithfully. The less art you try to put into it the better it is."

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