Christopher Joy and Zachary Keeting talk with Catherine Murphy about the work in her exhibition Catherine Murphy: Recent Work at Peter Freeman, Inc., New York, on view through April 27, 2013.

Murphy discusses her process and how she came to care "about the whole surface." She explains: "It's a kind of way of seeing that I linger, I linger, I linger, I linger, so that makes… a flat painting. If you don't decide you're going to focus your attention in one place, you're going to end up making a painting that's flat." She continues: "So I think my paintings are flat… even though there's this detail, there's an equal detail throughout the whole painting. That's always what interested me, even when I was a very young painter… I decided if I was going to talk about paintings in which you were seeing reality… talk about the act of observation, I had to get closer to how I observed rather than just use as a model how everyone else observed. In so doing I realized that there's two things, there's what I'm looking at and there's this rectangle and they have to come into harmony…"