Myles Murphy (painter)

Myles Francis Martin Murphy (14 February 1927 – 16 November 2016) was an English painter known for his mathematical approach to depictions of the human figure which he learned at the Slade School of Art where he later taught.

In 1954 he was seriously burned while painting himself in a wedding dress but subsequently won the Slade diploma prize for the portrait he was working on at the time.

He joined a group of students to whom Coldstream taught a precise method of depicting the human form using mathematical measuring that Murphy used for the rest of his life.

While doing so, the dress caught fire when it touched a paraffin heater and Murphy fell backwards on to a sofa that had been covered by his flatmate with petrol in order to kill bedbugs.

[6] In 1974,[7] he won the John Moores Painting Prize for Figure with Yellow Foreground which the Tate Gallery describes as showing "a sophisticated balance of observed detail and abstract, flat planes of colour.