[1] A two-time recipient of the National Endowment of the Arts grant (1979 and 1989), Murphy has received numerous awards and honors for her work, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1982) and most recently the Robert De Niro, Sr. Prize in 2013.
In the third grade, her teacher allowed her to paint, paste and also draw on the blackboard in the back of the classroom.
[3] Murphy's drawings, prints and oil paintings, created solely through direct observation, are highly detailed depictions of people, objects and spaces.
Using natural light, her meticulously composed setups are often rendered at a scale larger than the original subject.
"[6] With regard to the formal qualities of her work, Hilton Kramer wrote in 1975 that Murphy, not yet 30 years old, was in possession of a "firm pictorial mind", exhibiting a profound awareness of Modernism and Cubism while carrying "the realist impulse into a terrain all her own".