Herbert Lee Murrie was born in Chicago, Illinois on September 4, 1935.
Murrie learned very early, in his pre-teens, how important it is to paint every day. How important it is to feel the tools in your hands
everyday. To play with the paint and see how colors react to one another. But one of the most important things that several art schools taught him was confidence and independence in his selection of determining what was good or bad in his choices of art.
Murrie graduated from the University of Illinois in 1957 with a degree in Fine Arts. He turned down an assistant professorship when he graduated, and went back to Chicago to join an advertising agency as an assistant art director to work as a designer, forgoing his education in the fine arts at least temporarily.
After working for several years at a couple of design studios he started his own design firm creating high-end promotion pieces for a variety of manufacturers.
Over the next four years they began to work for some of the largest manufacturing firms in the country; Dow Chemical, Goodyear, Jockey Menswear, Bell & Howell, and Zenith to name a few.
Soon Package Design and Brand Identification took over the business.
The client list grew to include Quaker Oats, Nestlé, Kraft Foods, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, Keebler Cookies, Oscar Mayer, Bristol-Myers, Lever Brothers, Lipton Tea, and SC Johnson. Some of the many product companies that they created brand identities and packaging for that they brought into the marketplace.
In 2007 Murrie sold the business to one of the leading design executives in the country. He had continued to paint over this long period since university. Murrie had never shown his work until 1998 and has never looked back.
Murrie’s art school training was classic in nature. His love of painting leaned toward the French Impressionists, Monet, Cezanne, Sisley, Gauguin to name a few. Never the less, he greatly admired what was happening in the early 60's and 70's by the American abstract painters, such as Wilhem de Kooning, Arshile Gorki, Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock.
His early landscape paintings came from his many trips to Italy in the early 70s where he eventually bought a home, spending 4 to 5 months a year painting. He entered many juried contests in the early 90's and was excepted into several shows.
In 1998 he was represented by a Chicago gallery and during the next five years did very well selling impressionistic landscapes. Over the next 10 to 12 years his painting moved slowly to the abstract.