He spent most of his life living in the Eaglemont and Heidelberg area in Melbourne although he also travelled around country Victoria to paint and draw.
He produced an extensive body of landscape paintings as well as portraits, but he is best known for his printmaking, where he was heavily influenced by Japanese woodcuts.
[1] Griffin was appointed an official war artist in 1941 to work with the 8th Australian Division in Malaya.
During his three months' service there he completed pictures which were prepared for transport to Australia, but which did not leave the country, and are lost.
The Australian War Memorial holds an extensive collection of this work, but in the exhibition Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture by Australian Official War Artists 1943-44 a note explained that his self-portrait was "the only work of Murray Griffin that can be shown.