Devin Murphy has been creating visual art for most of his life. Most recently his visual art pursuits have sifted from primarily being created with traditional visual art mediums like acrylic paint and pencils to being created for the must part using the computer based medium of Paint (commonly called MS Paint by its users). But Devin is not just a visual artist; in fact he is also a prolific poet. Most of his poetic pieces have structures which would make them ideal candidates to become lyrics for contemporary rock and contemporary country songs. And in his poems as well as in his visual art he has explored such themes as being bullied, his identity as a Unitarian Universalist (UU), his religious experiences (within UU) and his religious beliefs. Also elements of abstraction are often vary common in his MS Paint art and at times to the exclusion of all other possible elements and themes.
He was born in Toronto on Saturday, October 9, 1982 and, grew up in Russell and Ottawa. Will growing up he spent many a weekend at the First Unitarian Congregation of Ottawa, as a kid, going to Sunday School, and as a youth, attending there, youth group. Will he was in youth group, (summer 1997 to fall 2002) with his fellow youth group members, they put on weekend youth conferences (3 over his time in youth group). And at the last of these conference to which he helped to put on (fall 2002) he served the position known as co-funk master (i.e. one of the conference’s 2 co-leaders). And he also with his youth group members, went to weekend youth conferences in northern and southern New York State (a bout 3 a year). Will at these youth conferences he began performing at there late night coffeehouses, some of his original poetry, and some of the wacky group poetry he collaborated on, including the now cult classic poetry series “The Judy Story Poems“. He started writing poetry about 14 years a go, and he discovered slam poetry at the 2004 Wordlympics in Ottawa. And during the initial season of Ottawa’s monthly slam competition
night, Capital Slam, he performed some of his original slam poetry, which got him qualified for a place in there play-off semi-finals by finishing in the regular session in the top 12, ranked in 11th place. And at the Capital Slam semi-finals he finished in the top 8, ranked 8th, qualifying him for the finals where he finished still in 8th, which got one of his slams, one entitled She Just Made An Apple Pie on their first CD called Live at Capital Slam 2005.
Recently he has been an active member of the First Unitarian Congregation of Ottawa. And he was a member of their young adult group “The Noble Birds”, their Evening Writers’ Group, and a regular at their monthly arts evening known as Arts Night (host 4 times). And he was one of the facilitators of their 07-08 Coming of Age Sunday school class for 12-year-olds. He is currently active in the life of the Unitarian Church of Montreal, Montreal’s UU young adult group called UU Crew and is pursuing the goal of becoming a high school teacher with the ultimate gaol of opening an alternative high school and teaching there.
He can be reached be e-mail at, nived_90@yahoo.ca (for messages on all things Unitarian Universalist and from friends and family)
and at, lyricsofmylife@yahoo.ca (for messages about creative things like, art and poetry including alternative education).
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