JJ MURPHY GALLERY is excited to present “Grocery Slips,” a solo exhibition of recent paintings by Andrew Shea, opening Wednesday, October 15, from 6 to 8 PM. The show runs from October 16 to November 15, 2025. Gallery hours are Thursday–Saturday, 12–6 PM.

In using everyday life as source material for his paintings, Andrew Shea is mining the tradition of Pierre Bonnard, who explored domestic interiors and daily rituals throughout his career. The noted artist once famously said, “If people could see properly and see whole, they would all be painters.” Or they might become poets. Shea’s aesthetic project also relates to the work of such notable American poets as William Carlos Williams and James Schuyler, who attempted to detail ordinary experience with a certain clarity of perception. In his poem “February,” Schuyler described what he could see while looking out his NYC apartment window: “It’s the yellow dust inside the tulips. / It’s the shape of a tulip. / It’s the water in the drinking glass the tulips are in. / It’s a day like any other.”

“Grocery Slips” suggests Shea’s concern with quotidian events, as do individual titles: Morning Coffee, At Breakfast, Steak Dinner, A Nap, and Morning Light. His work blends figuration and abstraction. Routine scenes provide him with the equivalent of a model. Shea begins with a quick drawing done in graphite or watercolor, which he later translates into a painting. A work might begin with direct observation, but through the complex process of making the painting, the artist grapples with the elusiveness of trying to fix an image in memory. As Shea notes, “Many aspects of an image seem to slip away, beyond one’s grasp, leaving only certain things that remain solid in the mind.”

Despite employing a figure, Shea’s work bears little relation to traditional portraiture. He is not interested in capturing the personality or the features of the person he initially draws, but rather in trying to record the subjective perception of something he has seen. In “Steak Dinner,” the young woman at the table bends over to feed a scrap of meat to a small dog. The interest in the painting lies in the way her body leans over; the light falling on her neck, shoulder, and hair; the illuminated atmosphere; and the sensory experience of the various colors in this simple scene at the dinner table.

Shea not only interrogates the act of perception, but he also engages with the materiality of paint. Working in oil, Shea tends to create his paintings over long periods of time. As a result, the surface of the works, including the edges, becomes an important element, with some areas consisting of thick impasto. Shea observes, “I like to think about how a painting’s surface ‘talks’ to us, how it recounts an experience through its residual gestures—much as the disheveled remains of a table setting tell us something about the meal that just took place moments ago.”

Andrew Shea has shown paintings in New York City; Los Angeles; Providence, RI; and Portland, ME. He had a solo exhibition at Stowaway Gallery LA in 2025; this is his first solo exhibition in New York. Shea has written art reviews for publications such as the Brooklyn Rail and the Wall Street Journal, as well as catalogue essays for exhibitions in New York and Boston. He currently teaches at RISD and the Borough of Manhattan Community College. Shea received his BA from Dartmouth College and his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. He lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island.