Cordia & Coco Bring Rye Nature to Life in Art

Cordia Loretta Murphy's artistic eye for detail has been sharpened by a non-conformist lifestyle and  a love of nature. She forays around the waters of Rye in her rowboat named Coco snapping away with her digital camera.

Murphy’s vision is on display at the Rye Free Reading Room through March 31 in a photography exhibit called a “Palette of Rye.”

That “palette” splashes across the walls in framed photographs of egrets, seagulls, herons, hummingbirds, and songbirds. Deer, sunrises and sunsets, sailboats anchored at dawn and dusk and more in shimmering framed photograph-quality pictures.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then Murphy's exhibit speaks volumes for and about her. The paralegal-turned-writer quit her job to attend  Mount Holyoke on scholarship, earning a college degree in fine arts at the age of 50; a master’s degree from the College of New Rochelle in visual arts at 60.  

She bought a rowboat, christened Coco, so she could paddle ‘round Rye at all hours of the day and night soaking up the natural beauty and capturing what she sees with her digital camera.

She lets her camera speak for her love for nature in and around Rye; its waters, marshes and woodlands, the nooks and crannies of Milton Harbor and its tidal estuary Blind Brook,  to Beaver Creek near Park Avenue and the Marshlands Conservancy on Post Road.

Her focus is on what she calls her “personal and profound relationship with the natural beauty of the waters, marshes and woodlands” of Rye.

“Since I was a young girl, I could see things in nature that others didn’t see,” says Murphy.  “I call it looking under reality. There is something awesome happening below the surface of what is apparent. It is in the shimmering sparkle of the sun on waves at midday and in the reflective glow of deep shadows at sunset.”

When she discovered digital photography in 1998, she says she was thrilled in its instant gratification –she could see a reflection and capture it on the spot. 

 “Before that, I only wrote about the beauty that inspired me,” she says. “Now I could see my view of things honestly represented in a photographic way that I could share with others.”

The 23 photographs on display at the library are like a trip to a fine arts museum, and it is a trip you may want to make more than once.

Further information:  The Rye Free Reading room, 1061 Boston Post Rd.;  phone: 967-0480; www.ryelibrary.org.