Murray Lemley, the stalwart photographer, focusing to release the eighth installment of his renown series “Tales from Afar”. The remarkable journey of a wanderlust Artist, Larry McLaughlin, who is now splitting his time between Arizona and France is set as the main theme of the series.
Murray met McLaughin last year in Phoenix and as Larry is a good old friend of him, Murray thought portraying his journey through informative photographs and descriptive narratives would be a good fit for “Tales from Afar”.
Murray conveys to us that earlier in November when they met in Paris, Larry wanted to show where he studied sculpture in the 1980s with great eagerness. This is when the plan for this creative venture strikes hard in Murray’s mind.
So they started with ‘La Palette’ a casual place for hangouts for artists, writers and other creative thinkers where Larry also spend some good times during the days of his Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts (National School of Fine Arts) or just Les Beaux-Arts.
After having a good chat over some coffee they walked into Les Beaux-Arts, the place which nurtured the artistic abilities of Larry and taught him to chase his dreams. At first, they faced some issues from the security’s side, as after the gruesome terrorist attack of recent years this place has been surrounded with strong security units. However, Larry came up with his winning smile and charming French language skills which somehow melt the security and eventually allowed them to go inside.
After the successful tour, they found the studio where Larry studied for four years. Some young students are now working there, wondered how they have got in. Larry overwhelmed them with more charm and got into some memoirs about those yesteryears when he worked and studied here.
This is the place that helped him to look and explore fresh and innovative ideas and enriched him to perfect his chosen genre of art. The form of art which he chose is mostly of mixed media but his primary concern remains on hand-made fashionable sculptors made by wood or steel and wire if required.
Larry bought a house near Sancerre about 30 years ago, this worked as a professional space for him where he worked out with different creative endeavors. He also has a 2 acre of plot in a desert near Scottsdale, Arizona. He spends his time quantitively in both of these locations as traveling helps him to seek different inventive ideas and also it provides a guide map to look for places for organizing his shows, galleries, and museums.
Figures show that Larry has had over 100 exhibitions and currently he is venturing 20 shows a year, most of it is group shows performed with artists of different mediums. Last month he received a good opening of 4 shows in France.
His work generally crafted out a unique twist of animal and human figures just like we find in the works Late Swiss sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti. His work gets portrayed most playfully but the critic suggests, it is very much intense and carries its seriousness.
Larry’s parents lived on the corner of the city with views featuring the open sky and the green bushes, probably this is the reason an artist grew up in Larry with a very early age. He went to a private Catholic Grade school and enjoyed literature, melody, and history immensely.
During his higher studies, he was very much fond of unstructured classes at the University of California, this was a common thing at the concurrent time like in Evergreen College of Wash, Tacoma or Hampshire College in Vermont. This was a helpful tool for the students to dive into an organic form of art, majorly for the students who are self-motivated like Larry.
