An Interview with Mr Murray
Our interview with our Art teacher Mr Murray was a brief 15 minutes long, but proving a compelling and amicable interviewee, the time with him passed quickly. We wanted to find out how and why he started teaching, and his thoughts on art in education. However we quickly deviated to a range of other topics.
Mr Murray started out as an illustrator, working in children’s books and magazines. Yet being a freelance artist, he eluded, was challenging, as the work was irregular. He told us that ‘for practical reasons’ (he was getting married) he ‘needed a proper job’ and this lead him to reflect on the ‘wonderful’ art education he received. This, combined with a desire to pass the knowledge and skills he had accumulated on to the next generation, led him to his current career. He completed a degree in art history (he already had a diplomacy) and then a post graduate certificate in teaching, before launching into teaching art.
One attraction of a job as a teacher for Mr Murray was the ‘good holidays’ which he said were advantageous as an artist. He expressed a firm belief that ‘a good art teacher is a practicing artist as well’, and he exercises this in a studio at the end of his garden. He enjoys listening to music while he’s there: Radio 3 (“if I were being pretentious”), Radio 4 and Radio 2, particularly on Sundays during ‘Sounds of the 70s’, as well as Simon and Garfunkel and Bob Dylan on CD. When asked what his favourite media is he paused thoughtfully, before saying: “everything’s rooted in drawing.” This, he said, is due to his illustrator beginning. When we wants to be a bit looser he paints, and he has found that his style has evolved over the years to become more abstract, especially recently. At this point, he mentioned subtly that he has a website, which we of course offered to promote. www.nigelmurrayart.co.uk is the site, but bear in mind “it needs updating”.
Later, we moved on to talk about his other passions which, by the way, is a word that he hates for its overuse. Music has always been an interest of his, we found out, as he is married to a flautist and himself sings bass. He enjoys going to concerts, ballet and the opera (“when we can afford it”) as well as reading. We mentioned chess causally, as we know he runs a chess club at school, which led us to discover that Mr Murray often plays chess online under the alias ‘Mr Subtle’!
“I’m one of those people that’s always got something to do – art is my hobby. I’ve always got art because, to the day I die, you can never crack it, there’s always more to do. You can never say you’ve done it, you can always improve it.”
Mr Murray would like to see more of art in education, and thinks the plans to cut creative subjects are “very short sighted”. He says art is a “multi-disciplinary activity” and this broadness of skills helps to balance out more academic subjects. He said wisely: “We live in a very visual culture -we’re bombarded by images - so I think it’s good to be visually literate.”
Our final question was about what Mr Murray would change about the school if he could, to which he responded that “school life is highly pressured, for students and teachers, to a detrimental degree.” He shed some light on the life of a teacher, saying “the teacher workload is too much”, and indicated that for both bodies the pressure should be lifted somehow. He also went on to say that he is “not convinced of the value of homework” and believes that there is too much, and also supports some kind of mini Pie2 (Pie Squared) time in the curriculum. Pie2 day, for those who don’t know, was a full day of lectures and workshops in a variety of non-curriculum subjects selected by the students. It was designed to give students a chance to ‘expand their horizons’ a phrase used by Mr Murray in support of such a practice. He concluded by planning a “large pay rise for all teachers”.
Mr Murray was very happy for all of these opinions to be published - “I don’t think I’ve said anything slanderous”.