Originally from Bradford, Murgatroyd Studied Fine art at Chelsea College of Arts in London. He has an obsession with history which has a great influence on his work; understanding the past allows him to make sense of the tangled web of influences, events and emotions that make up the existential human experience.He implores an underlying fun witty evolution in his paintings from an immediacy of colour and figuration, weaving through to carefully constructed allegorical still life and surrealism.
Objects and symbols that build our own histories, but recognisable by all in how we transfer our emotional memories onto objects, allowing them in some way to become otherworldly.His creations compel us to view his life and ours with its raw untethered beauty, constructed in his own reality, but recognisable by all. He links together many references from social studies of human being placed in the reality of imagined environments.His paintings act as a stage which brings together the myriad of characters and objects he has come into contact with; both imaged and lived. His work comprises of a wide range of topics, from his personal still life pieces to landscape paintings, which commonly feature captured images of the past. Structured compositions using this ethos are the framework of the works he creates.