let’s talk with sean murtha aboutdioramas...copyright 2003 4 interviewwith an artist let’s talk...

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What does Sean Murtha do at the American Museum of NaturalHistory? Sean Murtha is an artist in the Museum’s Exhibitions department. He mainlypaints backgrounds for dioramas.

What’s Sean’s take on painting dioramas? > did anyone in particular have an early influence on you?The bird painter Francis Lee Jaques. When I was a teenager, I found a book Ireally liked called 20th Century Wildlife Artists. It mentioned several differentartists, one of whom was Jaques. What really struck me was that it men-tioned that Jaques had worked on background paintings at the AmericanMuseum of Natural History. This was the first time I was able to put a nameto one of the background painters.

> how did that change your feelings about the dioramas?It made me realize that actual humans had worked on them. Before that, I’dthought the dioramas were just perfect. I didn’t even think about what it tookto make them until I realized that there were names involved, that peoplehad done them. Then I was able to pick out which ones at the museum wereby Jaques or by other artists, and to see different hands at work, even thoughI didn’t yet have names for the other artists.

interview with an artistLet’s Talk With Sean Murtha About Dioramas

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milstein hall of ocean life

roderick mickens / amnh

field of study Art

hometown Port Jefferson Station, Long Island

favorite middle/ “Science and art were my favorites, of course.”high school subjects

least favorite middle/ “Math was my worst subject, and I’m finding out that in this field high school subjects math is very important.”

Interests in middle school “I’ve been drawing as long as I know. My dad would bring home reamsof computer paper, and I would fill it all up.”

thoughts on high school “I went to high school in Port Jefferson Station, Long Island. I wasknown as the guy who drew dinosaurs. Everybody thought I would windup here, but as a scientist.”

thoughts on art school “I went to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and I didn’t fit in there very well,mostly because I was stubborn, mostly because I thought I was on theright track—and I was. But it wasn’t a track that went over well in apost-modern environment. I didn’t feel the need to experiment, or totry out more modern techniques. I’m not sure if that’s the way to go toart school, because I think I missed out on a lot.”

major influences “My high school art teacher, Eleanor Meier, definitely set me on thepath. I was just a kid who drew; art didn’t seem to me like somethingpeople could do for a living. She said, ‘You’ve definitely got to go to artschool. You’ve got to use it, and there are jobs for artists.’”

recent work “We’ve been working on the renovation of the new Milstein Family Hallof Ocean Life for close to three years. There are 12 dioramas, and ninewere largely redone. I did all the background paintings on those nine.”

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m o r e o n s e a n m u r t h a

INTERVIEW withan artist Let’s Talk With Sean Murtha About Dioramas


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amnh: Do you remember your first trip tothe American Museum of Natural History?

sean: There were many trips, and I’m notsure I remember the first one. But I doremember what stood out in the beginning:the blowup of the forest floor, with the giantinsects. It’s still on display. I think almost allkids fantasize about being small, and seeingsmall things as huge creatures. It was fantas-tic, and slightly frightening. And of course Iremember the dinosaur fossils. I alwaysloved the dioramas, but it wasn’t until I wasa little older that I began to understand whatthey were and appreciate them.

amnh: So when did nature occur to you as asubject for an artist?

sean: I would say in about fifth or sixthgrade, when I was 10 or 12 years old. I wasvery well known for drawing dinosaurs inmy school kids loved that stuff and I wasreally getting serious about it. But I realized Icouldn’t draw real dinosaurs, and in order tohave something to go by, I’d visit the back-yard of a friend of mine who kept chickens.I’d watch their feet and the way they movedand I’d draw them, which led to me fallingfor birds in themselves. I never really gotinto birding, in the strict sense of going outof my way to find rare birds and make lists,but it did lead me to explore local placeswhere you find birds, like the wide-openbays and salt marshes of Long Island’s NorthShore. And going to those places inspired meto paint them.

amnh: Did Jaques’ work or that of othernature painters influence your approach topainting dioramas?

sean: Definitely Jaques. Later the name ofJames Perry Wilson came up. As a youngperson I thought Wilson’s dioramas weredefinitely the best in the museum, and I stilldo, because they’re just so true to life.There’s a lot of thinking in his painting butnot a lot of expression, and everything is justright. His paintings have no flaws, really. Sohe became my favorite painter. I was alsoinfluenced by the more impressionistic styleof Fred Scherer, who, though long retiredfrom the museum, I have been lucky enoughto meet and learn from in person.

amnh: Tell me a little about the techniqueand skills a diorama painter needs. Whatdoes the process of painting a diorama back-ground consist of?

sean: A lot has to do with the large size,although painting large just means mixingmore paint and using larger brushes andmoving more you can’t sit at the easel. Thereal trick and this is something I learnedwhen I began to work here is the fact thatthe wall is a curve, not only from side to sidebut also from floor to ceiling. It’s a half-dome. This means that if you’re painting a



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straight line, or something that’s supposed tolook like a straight line, like the trunk of atree that’s standing up, it isn’t really astraight line. You have to distort it in orderfor it to look right. If it’s lying on the ground,like a fallen tree, it’s even worse. You reallyhave to bend things in a way that isn’t natu-ral, that isn’t the way you’d paint it on a flatsurface. There are no courses to teach youthis, and it took me a while. I had to cross abit of a gap, but I managed to find peoplehere who knew the old artists, or who knewold guys who knew the old guys.

amnh: What materials do you use?

sean: The materials are the same as thoseused in traditional painting. It’s canvas, justmounted on a plaster wall. I tend towardslarger brushes, but I still do the same thingsI would do for a smaller painting. One thingthat’s different is that with the kind of paint-ing that hangs on the wall, modern tastegoes towards a texture that’s somewhatloose, and brushwork that shows the hand ofthe artist. But with a background painting,you don’t want to draw the eye to the surface.You use a big bristle brush that looks like alarge toothbrush, and you bang it on the wallrather than brushing it across. That createsalmost a miniature stucco effect and takesout the brushwork. It gives everything aneven texture that doesn’t create any kind ofglare or shine. It doesn’t give away the factthat there’s a wall there, and your eye isfooled into thinking that the space just goeson.

amnh: How do you integrate the backgroundwith what’s happening in the foreground?

sean: In the background painting, you beginwith the sky and work your way down.Usually you start without any foregroundbecause you need room for ladders andthings. When you get to the point where thetwo meet, you stop, and someone else comesin and builds the foreground. Often, at thatpoint, I’ll have them come in and put downabout a foot of finished foreground at theback edge near the painting, some sand orgrass, and then I’ll continue painting the lastfoot or so, down to that, to match the colors.

amnh: Ideally, what effect should a dioramabackground painting have on the viewer?

sean: The objective, believe it or not, is tomake you forget that you’re seeing a paint-ing. You’re there to see the specimen, themounted animal, and the painting is justthere to let you know that it lives in the for-est or on cliffs or whatever. The backgroundpainting is not supposed to draw too muchattention. I can’t say to put as little of yourselfin it as possible, because everyone has hisown trademark style. But you really don’twant it to look like a painting, and that’s thehardest thing to pull off.

amnh: Who decides the content of the back-ground painting the time of day, the weath-er, the season, and the other elements?

sean: It becomes a team effort. You’ve gotcurators, planners, the artist, all of whomdecide what they want. A case in point is theharbor seal diorama in the Milstein FamilyHall of Ocean Life. In the old hall there werethese two sleepy-looking harbor seals sittingon a floe of ice. In the background you saw alittle open water and some mountains in themisty distance. They were being shown in


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Greenland. But harbor seals are one of thefew animals in the whole hall that also livenear here. I had seen them myself atMontauk Point, at the very tip of Long Island,which I mentioned offhand in a meeting.That kind of stuck, and we thought this wasactually a design concept that it would beinteresting to focus on the harbor seal as ananimal that you might be able to see within ashort drive. So we decided to do MontaukPoint in the wintertime. That was a lot of fun.

amnh: You’ve been hard at work on the dio-ramas in the newly renovated MilsteinFamily Hall of Ocean Life. What was thetoughest thing to get right?

sean: I think the toughest one was the ele-phant seal diorama. It’s set on GuadalupeIsland in Mexico. In the old one there weretwo males and one female in the foreground,and it was noted that at breeding time thetwo males would have been fighting and notsitting side by side, as they were. So we tookone out, and turned the one that was rearingup menacingly towards the wall, and on thewall we painted another seal facing him.That was tough. I think it’s the first time thata major focus of the action has been in thebackground painting. Also, it’s large, and weput a lot of detail in it: little islands in thebackground and vistas of distant coastline, aswell as a lot of little rocks in the foregroundand lots of seagulls. That one took about amonth and a half.



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amnh: Do you work off photographs?

sean: Yes, we get pictures off the Internetand from books, and also use personal pho-tographs. Steve Quinn, the Project Managerin Exhibition, was the source of most of thepictures for the elephant seal diorama. He’sbeen there, he takes good photographs, andhe had the best ones we found.

amnh: How do the photographs get translat-ed onto the grid?

sean: If we’re able to go to the site whichhappened twice in the Hall, once in Montaukand once in Monterey we take a series ofpictures that overlap from right to left andcan be transferred to a grid and then to thewall. If it’s a place we haven’t been, we onlyhave photographs of separate scenes. I createa scaled-down sketch in color that goes tomeetings with curators and designers. That’sthe time to make changes. Once it’s beenapproved, I have a final sketch that goes ontothe grid on the wall. Photographs becomereferences, but because they have to beblended or moved around, there’s a lot that’skind of made up. It’s largely up to me toassemble the scene. That’s when I draw onthe experience of being in places that I canthink of as parallel or similar, even if Ihaven’t been to the one in the drawing.

amnh: Tell us about restoring Jaques’Andros Island mural so that it could go backon view in the renovated Hall.

sean: That was really a dream come true.The Andros coral reef was the centerpiece ofthe hall before the blue whale was put in. Itwas built as a two-story diorama, with thelower half underwater, showing all the coral

and the fish, and the upper story being thesurface of the water and views of the islandand the sky. That upper half was all done byJaques, and it’s a beautiful painting, ofclouds, mainly, and distant islands andwater. It had been sealed behind a wall inthe ‘60s, and holes had been made in it, cat-walks cut through. When we got in there, wefound that probably 10 or 12 square feetwere missing in different places. We plas-tered the spots and I got in there, painting. Ihad to match Jaques’ colors and style, andthat was a great thrill because he was a heroof mine from my youth. It actually wasn’tthat much of a stretch because some of hisstyle was in my style, due to learning fromhim. It’s fairly seamless; I bet most peoplewho look at it won’t see the patches.

amnh: Did you discover anything unusualinside the Hall or in any of its dioramaswhile you were working on them?

sean: Things were left behind, in this hallless than in others. People always sign theirthings, and we find that everywhere. In thishall we did find brushes and tubes of paintand cut-out drawings of birds that weretaped on the wall while they were trying toplot out their designs. I think they were prob-ably left behind accidentally. Sometimes wedo leave things for future generations to find.

amnh: What have you left behind?

sean: I have to keep that a secret.

amnh: When did it first occur to you that youmight work at the American Museum ofNatural History?


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sean: It was really an accident. When I gotout of college in 1990, I heard about the fos-sil halls being renovated. I applied, but I wasnever very good at making phone calls andfinding out who was the right person to con-tact, and my work’s probably still floatingaround here somewhere. I didn’t get a calland wound up taking a job at a children’sbookstore. Many years later, in 1996, I wasliving on my own out of the city, painting inisolation. I realized that I needed somefriendships with artists who liked and didwhat I did, and I found out about a drawingclass here taught by Steve Quinn ofExhibitions. When I took the class, he reallyliked my drawings and asked me what I wasdoing. At that time the second bookstore Iworked at was going out of business, so Iwas open. He said I should apply for a tem-porary job here, and I got it. They generallyhire a few extra hands when they have a bigpush for a show. It was putting up the Ambershow, specifically putting up a little slice ofrain forest that you could walk around, a

diorama without the background. I wasimmediately put to work sculpting treetrunks, which was not my area of training,but it was fun and went well. That led into afull-time job when an opening appeared, andhere I am.

amnh: What’s your favorite thing about whatyou do?

sean: I think my favorite thing is that thework is different all the time. Sometimes Ican do what I normally do, like paintinglandscapes, and sometimes I’m asked to dosomething completely different. I’ve built aViking ship, I’ve sculpted tree trunks, I’vedusted dinosaurs. Although the work can betedious, it can be a nice change. And I lovethe fact that I commute in on the train with abunch of guys in suits, and I’m in my ripped-up jeans with paint on my hands.



let’s talk with sean murtha aboutdioramas...copyright 2003 4 interviewwith an artist let’s talk...

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