Original Oil Paintings by Gorden McMurry — The Painting Physician

Every painting on this page is an original oil on canvas — one of a kind, signed, and available for purchase directly from the artist.

These are not prints. These are not reproductions. Each one is the original work, exactly as it left my easel in the living room studio where I paint — in the northwest light that has shaped every color decision I have made across more than 100 paintings since December 2021.

I paint landscapes, portraits, wildlife, florals, abstracts, still life, and architectural subjects. That range is not accidental. It is the direct result of beginning with landscape painting — where every fundamental skill in oil painting lives — and applying those principles outward to every subject that has stopped me where I stood and told me it needed to be painted.

Selected works from this collection are currently on display at the Kore Gallery in Louisville, Kentucky. If a painting you are interested in is currently on gallery display, I will confirm availability personally before your purchase is processed.

Every inquiry and every purchase is handled directly by me. There is no intermediary. If you have a question about a specific painting — its size, its story, how it was made, or whether it is available — email me at [email protected] and I will respond personally.

Available Landscape Paintings

Promise of a Better Day Tomorrow

Oil on Canvas · 24 x 36 inches · 2026
Gorden McMurry — The Painting Physician

A severe thunderstorm is departing. The sky to the left still carries the full weight of the storm — deep blue-gray cloud masses moving away, their lower faces catching the last warm light as they go. Behind them, breaking through in the center and right of the canvas, the sunset announces itself in swirling orange and salmon clouds that build in warmth and intensity toward the horizon.

At the lower right, the sun sits just above the treeline — warm yellow against a deep red-orange horizon band, the specific color of a sun that has waited behind a storm all afternoon and is finally visible again. A weathered barn with a rusted red-orange roof anchors the foreground, small against the enormous sky, its road leading in from the left corner. It has endured the storm. The light is returning.

This is not a generic sunset. It is a specific atmospheric moment — the particular quality of light that comes when a severe storm passes and the evening sky opens behind it. Warm and cool, threat and relief, darkness and the promise of what comes after.

The title says everything the painting shows: the storm does not last. The light always returns. Tomorrow will be better.

Original oil on canvas. One of a kind. Signed by the artist.

Shipping available throughout the continental United States. Contact for an estimate of your shipping costs.

Mountain Majesty

Oil on Canvas · 24 x 36 inches

Gorden McMurry — The Painting Physician

A mountain face in full afternoon light — massive, ancient, and unhurried. The warm ochre and burnt sienna tones of the exposed rock face dominate the canvas, their layered geological strata catching directional light that reveals every fold and fracture in the stone. This is not a distant mountain softened by atmospheric haze. It is close, immediate, and commanding — the kind of presence that stops you where you stand.

A dark mountain lake fills the lower left foreground, its cool blue-black surface still and deep, reflecting nothing of the warmth above it and providing the darkest value in the composition. That stillness anchors the weight of the mountain rising behind it. Below the rock face a narrow band of dense evergreen forest fills the middle distance — deep green punctuated by a sunlit meadow of warm yellow-green that catches the afternoon light between the treeline and the mountain base. A single large conifer at the lower right frames the composition and gives the viewer a sense of scale — standing at the edge of the forest looking up at something that has been here far longer than anything else in sight.

The sky is pale and clear, the soft blue and warm cloud tones of a mountain afternoon in full sun. Snow catches the light on the uppermost peaks.

This painting was made from careful observation of the specific geological character of this mountain range — the way sedimentary layers record millions of years of pressure and time in the color and angle of the exposed rock face. A botanist's eye trained on the particular quality of light on stone.

Original oil on canvas. One of a kind. Signed by the artist.

Shipping available throughout the continental United States. Contact for an estimate of your shipping costs.

Available Animal Paintings

Master of Darkness

Oil on Canvas · 18 x 24 inches
Gorden McMurry — The Painting Physician

Almost entirely black. And yet — look closer.

The anatomical details are present throughout. The form of the head, the structure of the shoulders, the individual whiskers, the reflected highlights in those eyes — all of it is there, discovered rather than invented, visible to the patient eye that takes the time to truly look. In person, standing in front of the actual canvas, the details reveal themselves with even greater clarity.

Look into the darkness of the background. Faint diagonal marks suggest vegetation — the shadowed interior of a jungle at night, barely visible, almost absorbed into the surrounding black. The panther is not in an empty void. He is somewhere specific, and that somewhere is watching back.

I had never attempted to paint something this dark before. The challenge was not adding darkness — that is the easy part. The challenge was finding the light that lives inside it.

Every serious painter eventually confronts this problem: how do you paint a subject that is almost entirely the same value, the same color, the same darkness — and still convey form, depth, and life? The answer is not technique. It is observation. You have to look at darkness the way a surgeon looks at tissue under a microscope — without assumption, without projection, attending to what is actually there rather than what you expect to find.

Warm brown undertones along the jaw and ear. The difference between the cool black of the surrounding night and the slightly warmer black of the coat. The specific quality of light reflected in those eyes — the only point of high contrast in the entire canvas, drawing the viewer in and anchoring everything around them.

This painting taught me more about seeing than almost anything I have made. It is also one of the most technically demanding works in this collection — and one I am most proud of.

Original oil on canvas. One of a kind. Signed by the artist.

Shipping available throughout the continental United States. Contact for an estimate of your shipping costs.

Majesty

Oil on Canvas · 16 x 20 inches
Gorden McMurry — The Painting Physician

There is a reason we call them the great ones.

The African elephant fills the canvas — head on, ears spread wide, trunk curling gently downward, ivory tusks catching the light. The gaze is direct and utterly calm. This is not an animal that fears being looked at. It is an animal that has always known it does not need to.

The background is a deep, richly painted field of burnt sienna and raw umber — warm, ancient, and earthy — its varied tonal depth giving the surface a quality reminiscent of weathered African landscape. Against that warm darkness the elephant's cool blue-gray form emerges with the particular luminosity of an animal whose skin carries the dust and light of a continent.

The technical challenge of this painting is one that any painter who has studied animal subjects will recognize — elephant skin is not smooth. It is a map of wrinkles, folds, and fine lines that catch and release light differently across every inch of surface. Each wrinkle was observed and placed deliberately — not as decoration but as the specific evidence of an animal that has lived long and carried much.

The ears, spread wide in that characteristic display, frame the composition with a natural symmetry that feels both monumental and surprisingly gentle. The small eye — dark, deep, and watchful — anchors the entire painting. Look at it long enough and you begin to understand that you are not studying the elephant. The elephant is studying you.

Original oil on canvas. One of a kind. Signed by the artist.

Shipping available throughout the continental United States. Contact for an estimate of your shipping costs.

Available Equine Paintings

Equine Majesty

Oil on Canvas · 24 x 36 inches
Gorden McMurry — The Painting Physician

Kentucky horse country. There is no more fitting subject for a painter who grew up on a farm in rural Kentucky and has spent a lifetime observing the natural world with a trained and patient eye.

This bay horse is caught in a moment of movement — the black mane streaming back, the powerful neck arched with the particular tension of an animal in full expression of what it is. The white blaze running down the face is the compositional anchor, drawing the eye from the streaming mane downward through the long elegant line of the neck to the dark muzzle. Everything in this painting moves — and yet the eye is calm, alert, and completely present.

The coat is a study in warm color complexity. What reads at a distance as simply bay — that rich reddish-brown of Kentucky's finest horses — is on close examination a carefully observed range of warm burnt siennas, deep raw umbers, cadmium reds, and bright highlights of near-yellow ochre where the light catches the curve of the shoulder and neck. This is what a botanist trained to see the specific color of a leaf in specific light brings to the surface of an animal — not the idea of a bay horse but this bay horse, in this light, at this moment.

The background is deliberately soft and atmospheric — muted greens and warm grays suggesting a paddock or open field without competing with the horse for attention. The tree mass at the upper right provides compositional weight that balances the forward energy of the subject without anchoring it too firmly to any specific place. This horse exists somewhere in Kentucky. That is enough.

Original oil on canvas. One of a kind. Signed by the artist.

Shipping available throughout the continental United States. Contact for an estimate of your shipping costs.

Contest for Supremacy

Oil on Canvas · 24 x 36 inches · 2024
Gorden McMurry — The Painting Physician

Off the eastern coast of the United States, on a narrow barrier island shared between Maryland and Virginia, a herd of wild horses has lived for centuries. The Assateague Island horses are feral — descendants of domesticated horses that reverted to the wild state generations ago, reclaiming the instincts and behaviors that domestication had suppressed. They are not performing wildness. They are wild.

My granddaughter photographed these two stallions during a visit to Assateague — a moment of raw confrontation between two animals settling something that does not require human understanding to be immediately felt. The gray stallion rears and lunges from the left, dark mane flying, all concentrated aggression and challenge. The buckskin stallion rises on his hind legs in response — taller, lighter in color, his expression caught in that particular combination of alarm and defiance that only a horse in full contest can produce.

Behind them the island landscape dissolves into atmospheric mist — tall palms and deciduous trees fading into soft gray-green, the hazy quality of a coastal morning that makes the two horses feel simultaneously grounded in a specific place and timeless in their confrontation. This is not a scene that belongs to any particular century. Horses have been doing this since before we were watching.

The compositional challenge was significant — two large animals in dynamic simultaneous movement, neither one the clear subject, both equally essential to the painting's meaning. The solution was the vertical axis that rises through both horses together — the gray's arching neck flowing into the buckskin's raised foreleg — creating a single unified form out of two opposing forces.

Painted from photographs taken by the artist's granddaughter on Assateague Island.

Original oil on canvas. One of a kind. Signed by the artist.

Shipping available throughout the continental United States. Contact for an estimate of your shipping costs.

Available Floral Paintings

Summer Beauty

Oil on Canvas · 18 x 24 inches
Gorden McMurry — The Painting Physician

These are not imagined flowers. They grow in my front yard in Louisville, Kentucky — astilbe, rising in their characteristic feathery plumes of deep pink and magenta in the full heat of a summer garden. I have kept a flower garden since I was twelve years old on a farm in rural Kentucky. Sixty years later the instinct that sent a boy out to tend a plot of ground is the same instinct that sent a painter to set up his easel in front of these flowers and look at them the way only a painter — or a botanist — truly looks.

The astilbe plumes rise on tall slender stems against a dense background of deep green foliage — the lush, layered greens of a garden in full summer growth, cool and shadowed behind the brilliant warm pink of the flowers. That contrast — hot pink against cool green, light against shadow, the specific vibrancy of flowers in direct sun against the depth of foliage behind them — is what makes this subject so demanding and so rewarding to paint.

A weathered log occupies the lower left foreground, its warm brown tones providing an earthy anchor to the composition and a natural boundary between the viewer and the garden beyond. The eye enters along the log, rises through the garden path, and arrives at the flowers — which is exactly the journey a visitor to this garden takes.

The color of astilbe in full bloom is one of those colors that challenges every painter's instinct to reach for a single tube of pink and call it done. These flowers are not one pink. They are warm magenta at the most densely packed center of each plume, cooler rose at the outer edges where the individual florets thin and separate, and near-white at the very tips where the light passes through. That range — observed, not assumed — is what makes them glow on canvas rather than simply appearing pink.

Painted from direct observation in the artist's own garden, Louisville, Kentucky.

Original oil on canvas. One of a kind. Signed by the artist.

Shipping available throughout the continental United States. Contact for an estimate of your shipping costs.

Flower Magic

Oil on Canvas · 16 x 20 inches · 2023
Gorden McMurry — The Painting Physician

Most people never see this.

They see the peony — large, extravagant, impossibly beautiful in its full white bloom, five or six inches across, the kind of flower that stops a garden visitor in their tracks. They admire it, perhaps photograph it, and move on. The heart of the flower remains unseen. Too small. Too easy to overlook when the whole flower is demanding all the attention.

This painting is what lives at the center of that flower.

I have kept a flower garden since I was twelve years old. I studied botany at the University of Kentucky. I spent fifty years as a microsurgeon whose entire professional life depended on seeing clearly at a scale most people never work at. When I look at a peony, I do not stop at the petals.

What the canvas shows is the specific, almost microscopic architecture of the peony's center — the dense cluster of golden yellow stamens radiating outward from the deep crimson pistil at the very heart of the flower, catching the light with the particular luminosity of botanical structures that have no reason to be beautiful at this scale and are breathtakingly beautiful anyway. The white petals radiate outward in every direction, their brushwork following the natural curve and movement of each petal away from the center — not flat, not static, but alive with the specific directional energy of a flower in full open bloom.

The technical challenge here is the same challenge that defines every white painting I have made — white is never simply white. The petals shift from near-pure white where the light falls most directly to warm cream in the mid-tones to cool gray in the shadows between petals, each value transition observed and placed deliberately rather than assumed. The golden stamens are the only warm color accent in the composition. They do everything — anchor the eye, establish the center, and make the surrounding white glow by contrast.

This is what a botanist and a painter see when they look at a peony. Now you can see it too.

Original oil on canvas. One of a kind. Signed by the artist.

Shipping available throughout the continental United States. Contact for an estimate of your shipping costs.

Available Abstracts

Ember Fields of Overlapping Warmth

Oil on Canvas · 30 x 40 inches
Gorden McMurry — The Painting Physician

This painting is about one thing: what warm colors do when they meet.

The canvas is organized into interlocking rectangular fields — deep crimson, burnt orange, cadmium red, warm ochre yellow, and the particular olive-brown that emerges when warm colors overlap and deepen into shadow. Where the rectangles meet, the colors blend and layer, creating new tones that belong to neither shape alone — the specific color that exists only at the intersection of two warm fields breathing into each other.

This is the painting's central discovery: that warm colors do not simply sit beside each other. They converse. A deep crimson beside a burnt orange changes both — the crimson appears cooler, the orange warmer, each color defined as much by what surrounds it as by what it is alone. Color is always relational. Never absolute.

The scale matters. At 30 by 40 inches these color fields are large enough to be experienced rather than simply observed. Standing in front of this painting the warm tones become immersive — the eye moves through the overlapping fields finding relationships and depth that were not immediately apparent on first looking. What seemed simple from across the room reveals itself as increasingly complex the longer you stay with it.

I have painted abstracts across six decades. This one distills a lifetime of color knowledge into its purest form — no subject, no narrative, no horizon line. Just the warm colors themselves, given room to do what warm colors do when a painter truly understands them.

Original oil on canvas. One of a kind. Signed by the artist.

Shipping available throughout the continental United States. Contact for an estimate of your shipping costs.

Study in Green and Blue

Oil on Canvas · 16 x 20 inches
Gorden McMurry — The Painting Physician

Look at this the way you would look at a cross-section of marble or quartz — the deep mineral veining that runs through stone, formed over millions of years of pressure and movement, revealing itself only when the rock is cut open and the light falls across it.

The forms descend from the upper portion of the canvas in a cascade of deep navy, teal, olive green, and yellow-green — fluid, organic, following the natural downward movement of mineral veins through a warm cream and ivory ground. At the top the colors are densest and most saturated, the deep blue-green forms distinct and separate. As they descend they narrow, converge, and thin toward a single point at the lower center of the canvas — exactly the way mineral deposits concentrate and taper as they travel through stone, following fault lines and pressure gradients that no human hand directed.

The background — warm cream and pale ivory with the faintest suggestion of warm yellow in the lower corners — reads as the host stone itself, the matrix through which these mineral veins move. Against that warm ground the cool blue-green forms feel ancient and specific, the complement of warm and cool creating the same visual tension that makes veined marble so compelling to look at. You cannot stop tracing the lines.

The textured areas visible at the edges of the canvas add a further geological quality — the surface itself suggesting stone, the painting becoming not just a depiction of mineral forms but an object with its own physical presence and tactile memory.

A geologist sees mineral veining through sedimentary stone. A painter sees a color study in cool descent against a warm ground. A collector sees something they cannot name but cannot quite look away from. All three responses are correct.

Original oil on canvas. One of a kind. Signed by the artist.

Shipping available throughout the continental United States. Contact for an estimate of your shipping costs.

Available Still Life Paintings

A Warm Glow


Oil on Canvas · 12 x 16 inches · 2026
Framed: 13 x 17 inches
Gorden McMurry — The Painting Physician

A single flame changes everything in a room.

This still life is built around that simple truth. A small oil lamp sits at the left of the composition, its flame the only warm light source in an otherwise deep, dark setting. The flame is small — perhaps an inch of painted canvas — but it is the emotional center of the entire painting, the point from which everything else in the composition is understood.

The objects arranged around it are a study in contrasts of surface and material. The tall ceramic vase behind and to the right catches the warm light on its upper shoulder while its lower half falls into the deep burgundy shadow that fills the background. Its surface is weathered and textured — not a pristine decorative piece but an object with age and use visible in its patina. The rounded oil lamp vessel at the left is similarly aged, its dark surface catching the flame's glow in a warm reflected highlight that tells you exactly where the light is coming from.

Between them, resting on the dark surface at the base of the composition, a white orchid bloom with its characteristic red-marked lip and green leaves provides the only cool color accent in an otherwise entirely warm palette. An orchid grower for many years — at one point tending three thousand plants in a greenhouse I built onto my Louisville home — I know this flower with a botanist's familiarity. The specific structure of the cattleya-type bloom, the waxy surface of the petals catching light differently from the matte surface of the leaves, the red and orange markings of the lip — these were observed and painted with the same attention I brought to every plant I ever studied or grew.

The deep burgundy background — rich, warm, and varied in tone — unifies the composition and gives the warm objects within it an almost theatrical quality, as if lit for a stage. This is a painting about the particular intimacy of firelight — the way a small flame transforms ordinary objects into something worth looking at carefully.

Sold framed in a narrow frame measuring 13 x 17 inches — ready to hang.

Original oil on canvas. One of a kind. Signed by the artist.

Shipping available throughout the continental United States. Contact for an estimate of your shipping costs.

Chambered Nautilus

Oil on Canvas · 16 x 20 inches · 2023
Gorden McMurry — The Painting Physician

There is a mathematical perfection to the nautilus shell that has fascinated scientists, mathematicians, and artists for centuries — the logarithmic spiral that governs its growth, each chamber proportionally identical to the last, the whole form a visible record of time and biological logic made physical.

This painting is a study in the most demanding of all color challenges: white on white, pearl on sand, luminosity against a pale neutral ground.

The chambered nautilus shell dominates the upper portion of the composition — large, spiral, resting on a white sand beach where it has come to rest after its journey from the sea. Its outer surface shifts from warm cream and pale gold where the light falls most directly to soft pink and subtle iridescence where the light rakes across its curved surface at an angle. Beside and below it, a smaller oyster shell cradles a single pearl in its weathered interior, its blue-gray surface providing the only cool color note in an otherwise entirely warm and neutral composition. Four pearls of varying size are scattered across the white sand — two small, one medium, one larger — each one a study in the specific way a perfectly spherical object catches and reflects light from a single source.

The white sand surface on which the shells rest is itself a painting within the painting — its warm neutral tones varied by the shadows the objects cast across the fine-grained surface, and by the presence of several rocks mostly buried beneath the sand, their darker forms just visible in two or three places across the composition. These half-buried rocks anchor the scene to a specific place — a beach, a shoreline, somewhere these shells actually belong — without competing with the shells and pearls for the viewer's attention.

What the photograph cannot fully convey is the final layer applied over the most prominent surfaces of both the shell and the pearls: an opalescent white paint that, in person, catches the light with the specific iridescent quality that real pearl and nautilus shell possess — shifting slightly as the viewing angle changes, never quite the same color twice. This is a technique that cannot be replicated in digital reproduction. The painting in person has a luminosity that the photograph approximates but cannot capture.

This is a painting worth seeing in person.

Original oil on canvas. One of a kind. Signed by the artist.

Shipping available throughout the continental United States. Contact for an estimate of your shipping costs.

Available Wildlife Paintings

The Beauty of Flight

Oil on Canvas · 18 x 24 inches
Gorden McMurry — The Painting Physician

This painting exists because of a challenge I would not have set for myself.

It was entered in a juried show with an unusual requirement — one painting had to be at least seventy-five percent white. I had painted white subjects before. But a white bird against a white sky is something different entirely. It is not a white subject. It is white on white — and making that work is one of the most demanding problems in oil painting.

The snowy egret fills the center of the canvas in full flight — wings spread wide, the primary feathers extended, trailing legs stretched out behind, yellow beak and yellow feet the only warm color in an otherwise nearly monochromatic composition. The bird is caught at the moment of maximum wing extension, the full geometry of flight made visible in a single suspended instant.

Behind it — and around it, and almost becoming it — is an overcast sky of warm gray-white cloud tones that shift and vary across the entire background. This is the technical heart of the painting. The egret is white. The sky is white. And yet they must remain separate, the bird clearly defined against a background that is almost the same value and almost the same color.

The solution is observation. White is never simply white. The egret's plumage carries cool blue-gray shadows in the folded feather masses beneath the wings and warm cream tones where the light falls most directly on the breast and upper wing surfaces. The sky behind it shifts between warmer and cooler gray-whites that provide just enough contrast at each edge of the bird to separate form from background without resorting to hard outlines or artificial darkening.

Every feather was observed and placed. The primary wing feathers are individually rendered along the outer edges — not because the painting required that level of detail at a distance, but because truly seeing a bird in flight requires understanding the specific structure of what you are looking at. A botanist's eye applied to ornithology.

The yellow beak and feet do everything a single warm accent can do in a cool composition — anchor the eye, establish the head as the primary focal point, and make the surrounding white glow by contrast. Without them the painting would be technically accomplished and emotionally inert. With them it lives.

This painting amazed me when it was finished. I did not expect it to. That is what the best constraints do — they take you somewhere you would not have gone on your own.

Original oil on canvas. One of a kind. Signed by the artist.

Shipping available throughout the continental United States. Contact for an estimate of your shipping costs.

Koi

Oil on Panel · 14 x 18 inches · 2023
Gorden McMurry — The Painting Physician

There is a particular quality of stillness in a garden pond — the dark water holding everything above and below it simultaneously, the surface barely moving, a world contained and complete within its own boundaries.

This koi moves through that world with the unhurried authority of something that knows it is being watched and does not particularly care. The orange and white markings — the specific pattern of this specific fish, not a generic koi but this one — catch the light from above in a way that makes the fish the brightest object in a dark composition. Everything else recedes. The koi comes forward.

The dark water is not simply black. It carries the cool teal reflection of open sky visible in the upper center, the suggestion of depth below the surface, and the particular quality of still garden water that absorbs light rather than reflecting it uniformly. Floating on that surface, water lily pads in fresh spring green occupy the lower left and upper right — their flat horizontal forms providing a natural frame for the diagonal movement of the fish between them. A single white water lily blossom rises from the lower left cluster, its delicate petals the only other light-valued element in the composition beside the fish itself.

The panel format — oil on panel rather than canvas — gives this painting a smooth, luminous surface quality particularly suited to the subject. Water, fish scales, and lily pad surfaces all have a specific reflective character that benefits from the evenness a panel provides.

Koi have been cultivated in Japan for over a thousand years as living art — selected and bred for the beauty of their color patterns the way a painter selects and mixes colors for a composition. Painting one is a conversation between two long traditions of deliberate beauty.

Original oil on panel. One of a kind. Signed by the artist.

Shipping available throughout the continental United States. Contact for an estimate of your shipping costs.

Available Architectural Paintings

Nostalgic Castle in France

Oil on Canvas · 16 x 20 inches
Gorden McMurry — The Painting Physician

I took these photographs myself on a visit to France. Standing at the river's edge looking up at this castle embedded in the hillside — the white stone towers rising above the treeline, the ancient rock formations on the left, the dense summer green of the valley forest behind it all — I knew I would need these images someday. That is the habit of a painter who has always photographed what stops him.

The castle sits in the middle distance, its cream-white stone walls and conical tower roofs emerging from the surrounding forest with the particular presence of a structure that has occupied this hillside for centuries. It does not dominate the landscape — the landscape contains it, the way France contains its history, casually and completely. The dense green hillside rises behind the castle and fills the upper three quarters of the canvas, its varied foliage catching warm afternoon light on the upper surfaces and falling into cooler shadow in the depths of the forest below.

To the left of the castle the rock formations rise in dramatic vertical columns — gray limestone weathered into the specific angular shapes that French river valleys produce, their cool stone tones providing a strong compositional counterweight to the warm cream of the castle walls. A river moves through the lower foreground, its surface catching light and providing the horizontal base from which the entire vertical composition rises.

This painting was adapted from my own photographs rather than copied from them. Compositional decisions were made — what to include, what to simplify, how to balance the castle against the rock formations and the forest — in exactly the way I teach: the photograph names the scene, the painter decides what the painting needs.

This painting appears on the cover of my Kindle book on painting — Mastering Composition in Painting — where it serves as an example of architectural landscape composition.

Original oil on canvas. One of a kind. Signed by the artist.

Shipping available throughout the continental United States. Contact for an estimate of your shipping costs.

A Scottish Abbey

Oil on Canvas · 16 x 20 inches · 2025
Gorden McMurry — The Painting Physician

This abbey has been destroyed and rebuilt at least three times. The last destruction came over five hundred years ago. What remains today is the stone structure alone — magnificent, roofless, its Gothic arches open to the Scottish sky, the windows empty of everything except air and the memory of what was once there.

My daughter and son-in-law photographed it on a visit to Scotland. Standing among the summer trees looking up at those soaring stone walls I imagine they felt what every visitor to a ruin of this scale feels — the particular combination of awe and melancholy that only something both beautiful and broken can produce.

The photograph shows what exists today. The painting shows something more.

Researching historical paintings of the abbey made before its final abandonment, I found evidence of the windows that once filled those great Gothic openings — the intricate tracery, the arched forms, the colored glass that would have transformed the interior light into something extraordinary. I painted those windows back into the structure. Not invented — restored. The tall pointed arch window that dominates the center of the composition, its teal and blue-green glass catching the afternoon light, is my interpretation of what historical records and earlier paintings suggest was once there.

This is the painter's prerogative — and responsibility. The camera records what is there today. The painter can decide what ought to be there, what was there, what the subject is capable of being when time and destruction are set aside and the eye looks not at the ruin but at the intention behind it.

The warm honey-gold of the sandstone walls catches afternoon light that has been falling on this structure in one form or another for nearly a thousand years. The summer trees frame the composition on both sides, their deep greens providing the complementary contrast that makes the warm stone glow. The sky above — pale blue with light clouds — is the same Scottish sky that has watched this abbey be built, destroyed, rebuilt, and abandoned.

Painted from a photograph taken by the artist's daughter and son-in-law in Scotland, with windows restored from historical reference.

Original oil on canvas. One of a kind. Signed by the artist.

Shipping available throughout the continental United States. Contact for an estimate of your shipping costs.

Impressions of Louisville

Oil on Canvas · 24 x 36 inches
Gorden McMurry — The Painting Physician

This is not a photograph of Louisville. It is an impression of it — the city as it lives in memory and feeling rather than as any single camera angle could capture it.

I have lived in Louisville, Kentucky for decades. This painting is my response to that accumulated experience — inspired by the atmospheric, light-driven approach of J.M.W. Turner, the great English painter who understood that a city is not just its structures but the air, the light, and the emotional atmosphere that surrounds them.

The Ohio River fills the foreground — wide, dark, and unhurried, as it has been since long before Louisville existed on its banks. The modern cable-stayed suspension bridge rises from the center of the composition, its elegant geometry a deliberate contrast to the older bridges that cross this same stretch of river further along — structures built generations apart, all carrying the same traffic between Kentucky and Indiana. In the lower right, the Belle of Louisville moves through the water — the historic steamboat that has been a beloved presence on the Ohio since 1914, her silhouette as recognizable to Louisville residents as the skyline behind her. She is both contemporary and timeless, exactly like the river she travels.

The city on the left bank is not a faithful map of Louisville. It is a gathering of Louisville's most memorable landmarks assembled into a single atmospheric composition — in the tradition of Turner, who never let geography interfere with vision. The twin spires of Churchill Downs — home of the Kentucky Derby and one of the most recognizable silhouettes in American sport — rise among the downtown structures. Other landmarks from across the city appear in the atmospheric haze, their familiar forms present without being literally placed.

The sky is the painting's emotional center — warm peach and golden yellow where the light breaks through on the right, deepening to cool blue-gray storm tones above the city on the left. That division of warm and cool across the sky is what gives the painting its drama — Louisville caught between weather systems, between past and present, between the river that defined it and the skyline that grew above it.

I live here. I painted what I love about it.

Original oil on canvas. One of a kind. Signed by the artist.

Shipping available throughout the continental United States. Contact for an estimate of your shipping costs.

Shipping and Delivery

All paintings are shipped professionally packed through the same fine art shipping service used by the Kore Gallery in Louisville, Kentucky for out-of-town sales.

Shipping cost varies by painting size and destination within the continental United States — typically between $200 and $500. A shipping estimate will be provided and confirmed before your purchase is finalized.

Fine art insurance is available at approximately $1.00 per $100.00 of declared value and is strongly recommended. Insurance coverage will be discussed and confirmed as part of the shipping arrangement.

All shipments require a signature upon delivery. Your painting will not be left unattended.

To arrange purchase and shipping, contact me directly at [email protected]. I will respond personally, confirm the painting's availability, provide a shipping estimate, and arrange payment through our secure Stripe checkout before the painting leaves my studio.