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Paul Murphy was born in 1965 in Belfast and studied both film and art history at Warwick University and literature at Queen´s University Belfast.  He is author of a book and several pamphlets of poetry and a book on the American poet T.S.Eliot (´T.S.Eliot´s Post-Modernist Complaint´, Postpressed, Australia).  He has published poems in journals from all over the English-speaking world but also in Austria (´In the Luxembourg Gardens´ University of Salzburg Press, Austria).  Many other creative projects included attempts to refresh poetry through the genre of musicals and the creation of librettos for possible operas.  Also many short plays and puppet plays.

As an artist he is known mainly as a magazine illustrator.  His illustrations have been published in poetry journals in New York and London, such as Poetry Express, London and via Maureen Holmes in the New York journal Bigcitylit which she edited until her recent, untimely death.   He has had small solo exhibitions in Germany and Italy and work has appeared occasionally in galleries in Belfast.  He is mainly interested in genre painting, still life and portraiture and has been influenced by German Expressionism in film and art.  He is interested in the way in which primitive art can re-invigorate the discourse of mainstream European art and admires genuine primitive German artists such as Gabriele Münter as opposed to artists versed in the mainstream discourse of Western European art who attempt to impose a primitivist aesthetic on their work, taking their lead from Picasso who said that the artist should try to paint like a child: "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child." Pablo Picasso

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