Using colors and shapes inspired by my synesthetic experience, I make paintings to enliven people where we work, rest, and gather.

Seeing music, tasting words, listening to language for the visual pulse — my childhood musical training remains an influence, as do my years as a writer and a meditator.

‘…I’m interested in how we inspire each other to be continually touched by life… by beauty and color and surprise…’

Since 2001, I’ve used paints and pencils to create large, multi-paneled works on canvas, and smaller works on canvas and paper.

From my studio in Portland, Oregon, I work with design professionals, gallerists, and with people like you throughout the U.S. and beyond.


❤️

To see works on canvas, explore custom, join the mailing list, and learn more, return to MURDZA.art.

Find me on Instagram at @tmurdza.studioart 


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HOW I CAME TO PAINT


Before I could tie my own shoes, I learned to play a small accordion from my band director dad. It was 1967, and I was three.

Growing up, I studied piano, saxophone, and oboe, then music theory and jazz at the Maryland public high school where my father worked. I played in all the bands, and sang and danced in epic musical theater productions.

I went to college at a big university just north of Baltimore, and studied avant-garde theater, learning new ways of materializing sounds in intimate performance spaces. I acted and directed, and wrote and produced original plays.

After graduation in 1986, I continued writing, distilling further into poetry and prose, and was published in journals and books.

I read writers who composed for insight and connection. I followed performers who abstracted words into pure sound. I loved artists who set their stages for communion with audiences, and allowed for awe and flowing expression.

A life lived up and down the east coast through the 90s -- Baltimore to Rehoboth Beach to New York to DC -- delivered me back in Baltimore one night in 1999, at a big wall with big paper.

Hands and thick pencils. Sure and unsure. Writing and unraveling words. Drawing and dissolving letters into shapes and lines. Seeing music, hearing words, feeling deep into language, going under, coming in upon the middle of something potent and… visual.

The epiphany lingered and intrigued me and, over the next few years, I learned from artist friends how to stretch canvas, how to find paper, use graphite, charcoal, ink and then: paint.