Murray Henderson

Where Precision Meets Instinct

For more than three decades, Canadian artist Murray Henderson has developed a practice grounded in technical precision while increasingly embracing the possibilities of instinct, movement and unpredictability. Trained in photorealism and working across drawing, ink, airbrush and painting, Henderson has built a distinctive visual language that brings carefully rendered figures into contact with expressive abstraction.

At the centre of his practice is Exact Abstract, an approach that emerged following an accidental paint spill over a nearly completed photorealistic work in 2010. What initially appeared to be a ruined painting became the catalyst for a new way of working, bringing control and disruption together on the same surface. Sport has remained a particularly important subject throughout Henderson’s career, alongside musicians, cultural figures and wildlife, with his work exploring moments of achievement, identity, history and collective memory. More recently, he has extended this interest through the incorporation of authentic sporting memorabilia into paintings, creating a physical connection between the artwork and the histories it depicts.

In this interview, Henderson reflects on the development of his practice, the origins of Exact Abstract, his relationship with sporting culture and the importance of continuing to move into creative territory where the outcome is never entirely certain.

You have been making art for more than 30 years. Looking back, what do you feel has changed most significantly in the way you approach painting?

I have been drawing for as long as I can remember. In kindergarten, my drawing ability was already being compared to students many years ahead of me, and throughout school I became the person people came to whenever something needed to be drawn or designed. I won national awards in juried art competitions and even designed my school crest.

In Grade 12, my art teacher gave me 100% on a black-and-white pointillist portrait of John Lennon. More importantly, he convinced me to turn it into my first print edition. We produced 200, and I sold every one except the ten I deliberately kept. That was probably the first moment I thought, maybe I really can do something with this.

When I was younger, though, a lot of my focus was on proving what I could do technically. Photorealism demands patience and discipline, and the challenge was: can I make this convincing? Can I make someone believe what they are looking at?

What has changed is that technique is no longer the destination. It is the language.

Today, I’m much more interested in what happens when control and instinct collide. I can spend an enormous amount of time building a face, figure or moment with great precision, and then deliberately introduce something I cannot completely control.

That would have terrified me earlier in my career.

Now I understand that sometimes you have to risk ruining something in order to discover what it can become.

Your signature style, Exact Abstract, brings together highly controlled photorealism with expressive, often unpredictable abstraction. What first led you to combine these two apparently opposing approaches?

That opposition is really the reason Exact Abstract exists.

Photorealism is about discipline, observation and control. Abstraction can be about instinct, movement, emotion and accident. For a long time, I thought of those as completely different worlds.

Eventually, I realised they could actually strengthen one another.

I loved the precision of realism, but I didn’t want the work simply to say, look how accurately this has been painted. I wanted there to be energy around the subject, something you could feel before you even understood what you were looking at.

So Exact Abstract became a conversation between the two. One part of the painting is carefully constructed, and another part is allowed to breathe, move and misbehave.

The realism gives the viewer something to hold onto.

The abstraction gives them something to feel.

You have described the process as building an image with precision and then disrupting it with emotion. What happens psychologically for you at that point when you begin to break apart something you have painted so carefully?

There is still a moment of fear.

You can spend days or weeks developing a section of a painting, getting the proportions, expression and details exactly where you want them. Then you are standing there with paint, knowing that the next gesture could cross straight through all of that work.

There is no undo button.

But that tension has become important to me.

I have to stop thinking like a technician and respond to the painting emotionally. Sometimes the mark is aggressive; sometimes it is incredibly subtle. The difficult part is recognising when something that looks “perfect” actually needs to be disturbed.

Once I make that first irreversible mark, something changes psychologically.

I stop protecting the painting and start having a conversation with it.

That is usually when the work becomes mine.

Exact Abstract reportedly developed after an accidental paint spill over a nearly finished photorealistic work in 2010. How important was that moment in giving you permission to work more instinctively?

It was probably one of the most important accidents of my career.

I had spent an enormous amount of time on this photorealistic painting and then accidentally spilled paint across it. My immediate reaction was that I had ruined it.

For the next day, that was really how I saw it, as a painting I had damaged after putting so much work into it.

A friend came to my house the following day and saw the painting. I was still looking at it as something that had gone wrong. He looked at it completely differently and said:

“Now that’s art. I’d buy that.”

That stopped me.

I stepped back and looked at the painting through his eyes.

What I had considered damage had introduced an energy that hadn’t existed before. Suddenly, there was this tension between an image I had controlled almost obsessively and an event I hadn’t controlled at all.

Instead of destroying the realism, the accident somehow made the precision underneath it feel even stronger.

That was the moment something clicked.

I had spent years learning how to control paint. Now I became fascinated by what might happen if I allowed part of the painting to escape that control.

The spill didn’t instantly give me a completely developed style called Exact Abstract. I had to explore it and understand why it worked.

But the accident, and my friend’s reaction to it the following day, gave me permission to begin.

Sport has been a major subject throughout your career. What is it about athletes, competition and sporting history that you find so compelling as an artist?

Sport contains almost every human emotion in a very compressed period of time.

Courage, fear, confidence, failure, sacrifice, triumph, disappointment, sometimes all within seconds.

At the highest level, athletes can spend their entire lives preparing for moments that may last only a few seconds, with the whole world watching. There is something incredibly human about that.

Visually, sport is extraordinary as well. The body is operating at its absolute limit. There is speed, tension, balance, impact and expression.

But what fascinates me most are the moments that become part of our collective memory. A gesture, a celebration, a shot, a race, a victory. One fraction of a second can become something people remember for generations.

As an artist, I love taking that fraction of a second and allowing someone to stand in front of it again.

That’s also why being named the 2026 ASAMA Sport Artist of the Year means so much to me. Some of the great sports artists I have admired, artists such as LeRoy Neiman and Stephen Holland, are connected to that history. These are people whose work helped define sports art for me.

So to receive that recognition myself, after all these years of painting sport, is a tremendous honour.

There is something very special about finding yourself connected, even in a small way, to people who once helped inspire you.

Your paintings often capture familiar cultural figures but present them through highly energetic surfaces and layering. Are you trying to preserve the recognisable identity of the subject, or transform the way we think about them?

Both.

The identity of the subject matters to me. I want someone to recognise the person, and often even the particular emotion or moment.

But recognition is really the beginning of the experience, not the end of it.

We are surrounded by photographs of famous people. We see thousands of images, often for only a second or two. Painting allows me to slow that experience down.

The abstraction, layering, marks and texture are my response to the person rather than simply a reproduction of their image.

So I’m not necessarily trying to change who the subject is. I’m trying to change the way the viewer encounters them.

I want you to recognise the person from across the room and then discover an entirely different painting as you move closer.

More recently, you have begun incorporating authentic sports memorabilia into paintings. How did the idea of combining collectible objects with fine art first develop?

It developed very naturally from the way I was already thinking about sporting history.

Collectors have traditionally had two different worlds. There is fine art, and there is memorabilia. One might be a painting interpreting an extraordinary sporting moment; the other might be an object that was physically part of that athlete’s story.

I began asking myself a very simple question:

Why do those things have to remain separate?

If I’m painting an athlete or a historic moment and I can incorporate an authentic object connected to that story, the work suddenly has another dimension.

The painting interprets the history, while the memorabilia physically connects you to it.

That became incredibly exciting to me because the artwork is no longer simply depicting history.

A small piece of that history actually exists inside the work.

When an artwork contains an object associated with a particular athlete or moment in sporting history, does that physical connection change the emotional value of the painting for you?

Absolutely.

There is something very powerful about authenticity.

You can paint an athlete beautifully, but when an object connected to that person is incorporated into the work, there is suddenly a physical bridge between the image and the real world.

I find myself thinking about where that object has been, what it witnessed and what it represents.

That doesn’t replace the importance of the painting. It adds another layer to it.

To me, the most successful works aren’t memorabilia with a painting built around them, and they aren’t paintings with a collectible simply attached to them.

The two have to become one idea.

When that happens, the object almost becomes another pigment in the painting, except this pigment carries history.

Your subjects extend beyond sport to musicians, cultural icons and wildlife. What determines whether a person, moment or subject has the potential to become a painting?

There has to be a reason for me to spend time with it.

A technically interesting image isn’t enough.

I look for subjects that contain some combination of emotion, movement, history, character or cultural meaning.

Sometimes it’s an athlete at the defining moment of a career. Sometimes it’s a musician whose work affected millions of people. Sometimes it’s an animal whose power or vulnerability tells an entirely different kind of story.

I also think visually. I’m always imagining what could happen beyond the photograph, where the realism might dissolve, where movement might continue into abstraction, where colour or texture might carry the emotion.

Usually, I know fairly quickly when an image has that potential.

I don’t simply want to paint what something looks like.

I need to feel that there is something underneath it worth exploring.

You trained in photorealism and have worked across drawing, ink, airbrush and painting. How important has moving between different techniques been in developing your visual language?

Essential.

Drawing was really my first language. Long before I thought about having a career in art, drawing was simply something I could do and something I constantly wanted to do.

Over time, every new medium taught me something different.

Drawing teaches observation. Pointillism teaches patience. Ink teaches commitment because you cannot easily take a mark back. Airbrush teaches extraordinary control and subtle transitions. Traditional painting gives you physicality, texture and gesture.

Eventually, those lessons stop feeling like separate techniques. They become tools you can reach for depending on what a particular painting needs.

That background is especially important to Exact Abstract because, for me, surrender only means something if control was possible in the first place.

The abstract marks aren’t there because I can’t paint something accurately.

They’re there because I’ve chosen to take the painting somewhere else.

Your work is now held in private and corporate collections internationally, and you have also used your art to support charitable and conservation causes. Has that wider audience changed the way you think about the role your work can play beyond the studio?

Very much so.

One of my earliest experiences of that happened before I even really thought of myself as a professional artist.

My Grade 12 art teacher encouraged me to make a print from my portrait of John Lennon. We produced an edition of 200, and I sold all but the ten I intentionally kept.

That experience taught me something very early: once an artwork leaves you, it develops another life.

Today, I understand that much more deeply.

I’ve seen collectors form very personal relationships with particular works. I’ve seen art create conversations between people who might otherwise have very little in common. And I’ve seen art used to raise money and awareness for charitable and conservation causes that are far larger than any individual painting or artist.

Those experiences have changed my understanding of what artwork can do.

I still believe the first responsibility is to make the strongest work possible. But if that work can also help an organisation, contribute to conservation, preserve a cultural moment or simply make someone feel something every day when they walk past it, that is incredibly meaningful to me.

The painting may begin in my studio.

I don’t believe that’s where its story has to end.

You have spoken about the potential for memorabilia-infused fine art to develop into a new collecting category. What would you like to see happen next, both within that area and within your wider practice?

I think there is an opportunity to create something that genuinely sits between fine art, history and collecting.

But the art has to come first.

I don’t want memorabilia simply to become a novelty or a reason to increase the perceived value of an object. The strongest pieces should work as paintings even if you knew nothing about what was incorporated into them.

Then, when you discover that an authentic piece of history exists within the artwork, your relationship with the piece changes.

Collectors increasingly care about story, provenance and uniqueness. A painting can provide interpretation and emotion; an authentic object provides physical history.

Bringing those things together properly can create something that doesn’t fit comfortably into the traditional definition of either fine art or memorabilia.

And perhaps that’s the exciting part.

Looking back, there has been a fairly consistent pattern in my career. I learned to draw, then pushed myself towards photorealism. I learned control, then an accident taught me to embrace unpredictability. Now I’m exploring how an actual historical object can become part of the visual language of a painting.

So after more than three decades, I’m actually less interested in repeating what I already know how to do.

I want to keep moving into territory where I’m not entirely certain what the finished work is going to become.

That uncertainty used to frighten me.

Today, it’s probably what excites me most.

For more information visit Henderson’s Website and Instagram