By Matt Mauney | Associate Editor
Labeling Murphy Elliott simply as an artist or a painter would be cutting him short.
Elliott’s talents showcase something much deeper.
“I work at the speed of imagination,” he says.
Around Plant City, many people know Elliott as an excellent house painter, but it doesn’t take long after stepping foot in his own house to see his talent with a brush extends far beyond a perfect cut along a baseboard.
Elliott, 60, specializes in cosmic or science-fiction art, with depictions of futuristic scenes of galaxies, asteroids and far away civilizations. His work has been featured in space magazines, on the Hubble Telescope website and on the National Space Society’s calendar, just to name a few.
One painting was even published in Forbes Magazine for an April Fools edition.
“It was a fake contest where they were offering a holiday vacation to a colony on an asteroid in space,” he remembers, laughing.
One of his most famous oil paintings, titled “Space Pirates,” gives life to a series in the “Sci-Fi Almanac,” including a character based on Murphy himself.
“Some people call it fiction, but I like to think that it just hasn’t happened yet,” he says.
UNCONVENTIONAL CHILDHOOD
Elliott’s childhood was anything but ordinary.
“Labeling it as a Huck Finn-like childhood would be putting it mildly,” he says.
Like Elliott, his father was a house painter, but during the heightened popularity of evangelist Billy Graham, he became a Pentecostal minister, who traveled the country preaching to big-tent revivals.
Elliott’s parents placed him in foster care at an early age, and he was put to work on a chicken farm in rural Delaware, where he says he was often beaten with sticks during his time there.
Through Elliott’s unconventional childhood, he always enjoyed drawing and art and also grew fond of math early in school.
“I excelled in math, and that was the direction they were pushing me in school,” he says. “It was something that always excited me, but then again, there’s a correlation between that and the art.”
Elliott realized his artistic talents in grade school, when he drew a photo-like picture of a rotary telephone. In the fourth grade, he drew a chalk drawing of the Bible scene of the three wise men traveling to Bethlehem on camels on a classroom chalkboard.
“They brought the entire school, class by class, to tour my classroom to see the drawing,” he says.
Elliott’s love for mathematics led to his infatuation with science fiction and, subsequently, science fiction art.
Elliott graduated with his high school diploma at age 14 and went on to get a degree in architectural engineering from technical school by 17. From there, he began working at Delaware-based ILC Industries, mostly on gasket systems of life-support systems used by NASA astronauts.
Elliott had a partial scholarship to the Philadelphia School of Art but never pursued that route and has no formal art training to this day. Instead, he joined the U.S. Navy and spent two-and-one-half years serving on submarines.
“I was and still am a small guy, so when I got there, I didn’t really have much say in the matter,” he says smiling.
TRUE PROFESSIONAL
After earning a degree in interior design/decorating, Elliott became an expert in helping people choose décor, accents and colors that work for his customers. He started his painting business in 1972 and has completed more than 14,000 jobs in the last 40 years.
“I like to think that I use my experience to save people time and money,” he says.
Some of the memorable jobs he’s done include lassoing a church steeple and painting the cross on top and doing all of the decorating for the Ramsey Pavilion at the Expo in 1986 at the World’s Fair in Vancouver.
Elliott continues to express himself through his art when he isn’t at his day job. In addition to oil paintings of outer-space colonies, Elliott also specializes in sketches of celebrities, iconic figures or even everyday local people.
From Jack Nicholson to Tiger Woods to Hunter S. Thompson, name a celebrity and Elliott has probably sketched his likeness. He has more than 500 celebrity drawings.
Elliott’s sketches are so realistic that they are almost like looking at a photograph, but Elliott strives to make sure not to cross that barrier.
“If you want to have a photo of someone, you can just get a picture,” he says.
The realistic elements of the sketches lies in the shading.
“Shading is all about dimension,” he said.
Contact Matt Mauney at mmauney@plantcityobserver.com.
