In Signs of Life, Francis Cook Gallery brings together five painters—Liam Murphy‑Torres, Olivia Hiester, Tucker Love, Holly Dudley, and Francis Cook—whose practices, while divergent in subject and sensibility, share a deep, tactile engagement with the medium of paint itself. They are bound by a shared commitment to painting as a durational, responsive process—one that privileges inquiry over resolution, process over product.

Each painter works in collaboration with their materials, engaging paint not purely as a vehicle for depiction, but as an active participant in the making of meaning. Their surfaces retain the evidence of their becoming: revisions, hesitations, gestures are left visible. The result is a shared sensibility that values openness, experimentation, and the physicality of the painted surface.

Liam Murphy‑Torres arrives at images of urban life, but resists fixed narratives. Subjects and compositions unfold through a process of call‑and‑response with his paint, in which pictorial structure emerges through revision rather than according to a fixed plan. Brushwork, color, and gesture are not stylistic devices but modes of thinking, where abstract painting ideas, sensation and memory enter the work. His compositions, though often rooted in observed experience, remain open‑ended; their vitality lies in their refusal to resolve fully. Murphy‑Torres’s surfaces retain the friction of their making, the evidence of a painter coaxing form into place rather than imposing it from above.

Olivia Hiester’s work offers a counterpoint in tone but not in method. Her quiet, luminous interior scenes are rendered with a simplicity that belies their structural rigor. Like Murphy‑Torres, she treats painting as an ongoing conversation between the image and the process of painting. Recurring motifs— chairs, cups, lamps casting light on a wall—are not endpoints, but occasions for exploration. Her brush moves gently yet decisively, recording not just what is seen, but how it is felt. Her handling of paint is subtle yet assured; soft transitions of color and light reveal the depth of her engagement with the process. Hiester’s canvases become repositories of time, where looking accumulates and the act of painting slows perception into reverie.

Tucker Love’s paintings are grounded in the physicality of the medium itself. Working in dense, sculptural applications of paint, Love approaches the canvas as a physical arena, one in which form is discovered rather than predetermined. His compositions, often sparse and elemental, emerge through the act of pushing paint around—a process marked by play, by resistance, and by the insistence of the medium’s own logic. Figures and objects flicker at the edge of legibility, not to obscure meaning, but to preserve the vitality of the search. What remains is not a fixed image, but a felt encounter between artist and surface.

Holly Dudley’s practice similarly foregrounds the fluid space between observation and abstraction, painting and motif. In faster paintings, she occupies this space through the economy of her hand, indicating figures and their environments broadly. In longer worked paintings, she allows marks to accumulate, but forms to dissolve into pure material. Edges blur, planes collapse, and gestures accumulate into atmospheric fields. Her practice is partially about constructing images and partially about listening to the paint—allowing it to speak, to shift, to respond. Her work reflects a commitment to attentiveness and to uncertainty, privileging sensitivity over clarity, sensation over depiction.

Francis Cook brings to this conversation a painterly clarity tempered by spontaneity. Her representational works are crisp yet responsive, animated by a sense of discovery. The tactile immediacy of her surfaces reveals a belief in painting as a living act, where joy and doubt are equally visible. Like her peers, Cook leaves evidence of her search: revisions, hesitations, decisions made and unmade. These marks are not corrections but coordinates, mapping the path of a painter thinking through her medium. Her pentimenti read not as flaws, but as evidence of rigor.

Together, these artists affirm painting as an autonomous practice. Signs of Life foregrounds the act of making; offering up a visual language attuned to the provisional and the contingent, the seen and the felt. In each work, the object bears witness not only to what is depicted, but to how—and why—it was made. This is representational painting not as a description of a subject, but as an encounter with life itself.