Still On The Road...Just

work in progress, oil on canvas, 120 x 150cms, 2020

I’m just posting to let you know that I’ve re-designed, updated and published a new version of my website. It’s still at the same address: www.shaunmorrispaintings.com.

It was forced upon me when I realised how different my website looked on the mobile phone, with all my titles and information absent. After contacting my site provider, ‘Portfoliobox’ (who I would really recommend) I was told I was using an old template and would need to do the whole thing again! Luckily (sort of) they migrated all of my images to the new version and I was left to plod on redesigning it over the last few months, able to keep the old one until I was ready to publish this new site. It’s been pretty easy, but just time consuming, but I’m pleased with how it looks. I’ve rationalised much of the work too into fewer portfolios of work, but most of it remains just in a different format. I’ve also added a shop to make it more accessible to buy my work as well as other things such as T-Shirts, Tote bags, and the Indigo Octagon Publications. I aim to use the store to showcase different pieces each month but as most of the work is for sale on my website, I just hope it gives anyone interested a guide to the prices of my artwork if they were interested in buying. I also hope to hold online sales of certain pieces of work for a limited period every 3 months next year, but that scares me a bit so we’ll see.

Exhibition at College view

Last weekend I delivered a recent painting, ‘Winter Field’, to an Open Exhibition at the General Office Art Gallery and Studios in Stourbridge. It’s an artist run set-up that’s been operating for the last 2 years or so, and is a welcome cultural addition to the Black Country Arts Scene which has seen the closure of many galleries in recent years including Dudley Museum and Art Gallery. For me, after a torrid year for all of us, but for so many artists including myself who has had two exhibitions cancelled this year due to Covid, it just felt great taking along a painting and showing again. The exhibition is due to open in January all being well, but will also be available to see online.

'Lockdown' (left) and 'The Green Door' (right)

'Limbs' (left) and 'Morning Way' (right)

'The Edge Of The Field' (left) and 'The Herald' (right)

And finally, I also in the last fortnight at work I also decided, quite spontaneously, to exhibit a few paintings in the corridor near the Art Department. There is a nice generous wall space there. It’s been an awful year due to Covid, but for me it’s also been one of my most consistently creative for a long time, with my painting as ever sustaining me during what continues to be a very challenging time. It’s been great to back teaching though and in amongst the community of students and I’ve been trying to deliver projects that ask the students to reflect on some of their own but also our collective experiences of the last few months, which is exactly what I’ve been doing since March too. I’m on a real creative journey, so It only seemed right to share some of my work too. I chose not to show my current work though, I’m not ready for that, but the more vibrant, colourful paintings I made from March to August. I’m so glad I did too- not only did they look great at college, but I had such a positive response from my social media friends it felt like I had had a small online exhibition of sorts. It felt really worthwhile.

Merry Christmas. Stay Safe.

 

The Far Field

oil on canvas, 60 x 80cms, 2020

I spent some time in the late afternoon cleaning up all my brushes after what has been an intense few weeks continuing to work on these paintings based on nearby fields between the town and the motorway. I’ve now made thirteen, of various sizes, with some more larger recent ones.  I see them very much as works in progress as each one I make often has me going back to a previous painting to re-think and re-paint different areas. 

oil on canvas, 120 x 164cms, 2020

I’m enjoying making them but I realised last night as I finished the latest one (above), exhausted, that I feel like I’m creating them with a lot of nervous energy- I mean it seems a bit crazy to have made thirteen in about four weeks- and I seem even more driven than usual. There is also something rather unexpected and a bit unsettling about them that seems to have emerged and that is when I look at the pylons in the paintings I just feel that I am looking at myself and I’m not sure what that’s all about. 

oil on canvas, 75 x 50cms, 2020

I was watching a video lecture by painter Wolf Kahn the other day, who has been a bit of an influence on my approach to painting the trees and hedgerows, where he stated as a painter that 'to know what you are doing is wrong. It's much better to not know what you are doing'. I have to agree and it was a point of view that really chimed with me the other day and a reminder of certain values that come in and out of focus.

oil on canvas, 80 x 100cms, 2020

Kahn was influenced by his teachings by Abstract Expressionist Hans Hoffman and this movement’s interest in working from the subconscious mind. Although I have spent years working to avoid psychological readings of my work, when it comes to my landscape work I think there’s no running away from it. 

'By The Way'....

-->I enjoyed the opening night last Thursday of ‘By The Way’ at The Bohunk Institute in Nottingham, which featured four of my paintings in what was largely a photography exhibition based on the ‘edgelands’, or wastelands, or margins and the ex-mining communities surrounding Nottingham and Mansfield. There were also text pieces displayed on the gallery walls complementing or created in collaboration with some of the photography, most noticeably a very striking and evocative poem by my artist/writer friend, Andrew Smith. 

 David Severn

My paintings were hung by the gallery in a surprising and dynamic way: four closely together, almost looking like one large wall piece (see image above). I was really pleased, particularly with a new one exhibited for the first time. Of the photography, I was most impressed by David Severn’s documentary photographs of the former colliery community and landscape around Mansfield, which were laid to waste in the 80’s. An image of young men in the back of a van really struck me, reflecting on the potential of their lives, but seemingly trapped by the circumstances of their birthplace, if this doesn’t sound too condescending. It’s just that in current times, the idea of any form of social mobility in this country seems an increasingly dim and distant dream.  Helen Saunders’ ‘constructed’ photographs of the overlooked edgelands landscape were also pretty interesting, particularly one of Birmingham. I’m never very sure about anything photoshopped, however, especially in this context, but they seemed to be successful more in the commercial context of being used on the original book jacket of the popular ‘Edgelands’ book. 

 David Severn

David Severn 

                                                                                          Helen Saunders

-->It’s nice at this late stage of my current Arts Council funding to feature in a group exhibition based on this theme, which seems to be very much in favour since the publication of the ‘Edgelands’ book by Paul Farley and Michael Simmonds-Roberts in 2011, and since I made my grant application. The book, which I enjoyed a great deal, despite the criticisms made that much of the material is explored better in the writings of someone like Richard Mabey, and his ‘Unofficial Countryside’, and others, certainly opened up a door for me to help me shape my own responses to the landscape with more originality and coherence.  I think it’s success is more about capturing some sort of zeitgeist in the air at the time and currently, although the phrase ‘edgelands’ is something Sian, the curator of ‘By The Way’, was keen to disassociate herself with as it is something that seems so overused now.  I agree, but it is a phrase I’m using unashameably as a ‘hook’ to describe my own current work, when discussing it or approaching galleries etc, as I think these things can be useful when trying to boil things down for these purposes. That’s all. I don’t think it gets in the way, quite the opposite. There is the world of making the work, and then the world of trying to market it to audiences.  It seems important to be realistic about these things if you want people to seriously engage with it.  Anyway, the show is on until the 30^th November. Below is Andy's poem: 

-->

By The Way

Crossing the rosehips    

Between treasuries

Feeling the sagging vervain

Brief swellings under the felly

Beneath forgotten cornices

Lying in the gully

The concrete stadium’s purring

Shovels on the foothills fizzling

thorns and winds

The sleep of dope

***

After the Pierrot of the broken glazing

The packages of spoon-fed florets

There is the padlocked mother

Standing hard and level on the surge   

Smelling colonial  

Tinged with mould and milfoil

Recounting many short shrifts

With large predatory gulls circling  

***

After estrangement

Approaching the round table

Passing the junk food to the right

The private detective

The bulges

The areas for parley

Coming upon the view

A sex and shopping blockbuster

Marshmallows underneath

***

Striking out from the civic centre

Under the vast yardang

Passions expertly shored with broken crayons

Laden with pangs stuck on with chewing gum

Armoured with brass

Lined with dried grating     old lint   

Seeking soft underground lactations

Covered by great standardized neuroses

 

   'Weird Nightmare', oil on canvas, 120 x 90cms, 2011

http://www.bohunkinstitute.co.uk/

...and

…and I came home tonight to an e-mail from Nuneaton Museum and Art Gallery offering me a solo exhibition of my paintings after an application to them that I recently made! They are offering me a slot from mid January to March 2014 in their White Gallery, which can house up to 50 average sized pieces. I’m thrilled. And how gratifying it feels to be offered a show instead of having to organize one myself for a change, but above all of that how gratifying it is that they wanted to.  I’d better get busy. It could be the just the opportunity I’ve been seeking to create some really large paintings…some more big stuff…and strange and fitting that it will be scheduled just at the end of my Arts Council funding.

Stepping Out...

 

'Sleep', oil on canvas, 150 x 180cms (selected for Worcester Contemporary 2013)

I was delighted to hear today that two of my paintings have been selected for the Worcester Contemporary Open 2013 exhibition, which opens on July 13^th at Worcester City Art Gallery. I’m delighted because the exhibition has been approached differently this year with the entrants being purely selected instead of just the previous free for all which had two strands to it: a selected exhibition (the winners), and basically another show that exhibits everyone else (the losers). I’ve always ended up in the dangerous ‘everyone else’ losers pile before, and after last time decided I wouldn’t bother again. It doesn’t do your work any favours to end up in this other show.  But with this year’s change of format and some of high profile selectors from the region, I thought I would try again. And this year I won. Hurrah.

'Silence' oil canvas, 100 x 120cms (selected for the Worcester Contemporary Open 2013)

I’ve also been approached by an artist’s group from Nottingham in the last couple of weeks to participate in an ‘Edgelands’ themed exhibition they are curating in a new artist’s run space in the city. One of the artists, photographer Sian Stammers, came across my paintings on the internet, I think from the labels on the blog posts, and asked if I would be interested, and then took my work to the rest of the group who have also agreed they would like my work to be part of their project. This is a really exciting development, and will take place in October.  It will be great to meet and work with some other artists from outside the region. The exhibition itself was also inspired by the Simmonds-Roberts and Farley ‘Edgelands’ book, which seems to have caught a fire in many ways since it’s publication, and now I’m on board Sian suggested the idea of exploring where the fringes of the East Midlands meet the fringes of the West. I can’t wait, and am meeting Sian in a couple of weeks when she will be visiting the studio.

All this is more exciting than the experience of exhibiting at the Park View Gallery in recent weeks. How come I end up exhibiting my work at the only commercial gallery that asks me for advice about selling work? That’s their job isn’t it? Perhaps telling people that my work is actually there via the website, or at least your Facebook page may be an idea…Oh well, and on we go.

Other Notes: I’ve become really into Pinterest in the last few weeks: the online pinboards where you share your passions with others in the online ether. Whereas other people seem to have all sorts of weird and wonderful boards and themes, my passions seem to somewhat predictably just centre around painting. After initially being keen to just start an ‘edgelands’ themed board as a bit of ‘research’, I’ve now got seven painting inspired boards on the go. In many ways it seems like a bit of a game or nice distraction, and I find myself quietly addicted.  Here’s a link:

http://pinterest.com/shaundmorris/boards/

http://www.worcesteropen.co.uk/

Ships Out To Sea...

I’ve just returned from a lovely break in South West Wales with my wife, Diane and our son, Isaac (I say ‘break’ in the loosest sense of the word, as holidays with a lively four year old are not exactly relaxing if I’m honest, but still lots of fun on the whole). We found ourselves in a caravan atop a hill overlooking the sea at Little Haven, a really beautiful, unspoilt stretch of coastline with some breathtaking cliffs and long, sandy beaches and wildlife. 

Strangely sitting silently each day and night in the sea were some enormous oil tankers, forever in view and scattered across the horizon. There were up to ten sat there on somedays serving the nearby refinery at Milford Haven, which is located here because of the unusually deep waters so the tankers can get close.  I found them quite ominous looking, and couldn’t help but feel drawn to staring at them. I made several sketches on my i-pad during the week that featured them sitting dumbly, unblinkingly in the dazzling,  sparklng sea. I made these last two one evening, wandering down to a nearby lookout to paint as the sun went down. 

They were both completed very fast in just half an hour, showing just how fast the light changes as the sun went slinking away below the horizon. Each painting contains several different recorded times captured in just the one image, something that you could only really do in painting.

Painting

This is a new painting I’ve completed (I think) in the last few days. I wanted to post it at the end of what has been a productive month in the studio, with the beginnings of some new edgelands inspired work such as this, and the new drawings.

In case you are wondering what this unusual image represents, it’s a group of parked HGV lorries reflected in the canal at night. The painting has been developed from a recent photograph, and I was attracted to the image’s formal, abstract arrangement. It reminded me of earlier Modernist paintings such as those by William Scott, or some of the St Ives painters. Only grittier. The canal, not the sea.

It was also painted differently, built up and rubbed back down to an underpainted bright red ground, which is something I’ve not done in a long time, preferring to work from white up. Making the pastels on coloured paper grounds lead me to try this, and I’ve really enjoyed rubbing back the paint to reveal the red, as much as applying the paint itself. It gives the painting a deeper lustre and depth, although that’s not that apparent in this photograph. It’s good not to cling too tightly to habits of working…

An Introduction to 'Stolen Car'...

When I originally started to develop these drawings and paintings of motorways I held in my mind Bruce Springsteen’s song, ‘Stolen Car’ as a sort of ‘working title’ and guide to the emotional tone I wanted to evoke. It’s a particularly sad and mournful song that deals with the emotional isolation of the song’s narrator as he reflects on memories of his past life and his crumbling relationship. In an admittedly clichéd way I imagined him driving this ‘stolen car’ underneath these motorways, or parked up in silence, or listening to some late night radio show, in his mind walking ‘the thin line between stability and that moment when time stops and everything goes to black’, in the same way that Springsteen has written about his bleaker songs, ‘When the things that connect you to your world- your job, your family, friends, your faith, the love and grace in your heart- fail you.’ It’s a feeling I’ve experienced, and I’m sure one we all have to one degree or another, at times along the way, and I have often found myself in this location, underneath the M5 just outside West Bromwich, my hometown, walking with just my thoughts for company, in an attempt to deal with the feelings that can often seem all consuming.  Sometimes you just need to keep walking or keep driving.

As this series of works has developed over the last eighteen months, that working title has stuck and here it is now committed as the title for this exhibition. It still seems apt, as that song and Bruce’s words and music, with its obsession with cars and highways and their metaphoric use for broken relationships and forgotten or lost dreams, has formed a continual backdrop in the studio as I’ve attempted to create my first serious body of landscape work. What started as an interest in exploring formal concerns in painting, and in depicting the so-called ‘edgelands’ of landscape, the nowhere zone between city and countryside, I grew up in, has developed quite unexpectedly into a body of work that steps out of the shadows of the dark and hidden passages and surrounding bridges, and cast by the lights that often appear out of reach, and more about the mental ‘edgelands’ I often occupy, as I find myself mapping a different sort of terrain altogether.

Shaun Morris

February 2013

'Stolen Car', charcoal on paper, 50 x 70cms, 2011

Sunday Painting...

i-Pad painting 9/12/2013, Oldbury

I was in the studio painting a large canvas on Sunday evening, the night before going back to work after the festive break.  It occurred to me that since I became a parent two and a half years ago, I create an awful lot of my paintings on a Sunday night. I’ve become the proverbial Sunday painter. I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that, but maybe it’s closer to the truth than I’d like to admit sometimes. 

It’s a New Year, and I’m approaching the second year of my Arts Council funding in February. After much thinking about my Scandinavian experience and the work I made there, I’ve decided to just get on and enjoy exploring some of it in some larger canvasses, more excited now about the possibilities it holds to open up some new areas in my practice, than other problems they may hold. On Sunday I worked on a large banded seascape, which felt rather exhilarating. I loved working with a different palette after the recent motorway work, and also to try and fill a painting with a sense of air and light after the dark oppression in the other paintings. I felt like I was by the sea, breathing in the fresh air. I’m not sure if the painting reaches that feeling though, but no matter. I feel like I’m at a point now after much procrastination, where I just want to dive in and see what I can find. It’s so often like that when it comes to my work.

At the same time, I’m also equally committed to getting back out into the ‘edgelands’ and seeing what I can find on my day off, and weaving any work about Scandinavia around this. The motorway paintings have presented to me the idea that a particular place that may contain more personal resonances is of importance to me in regard to working from the landscape, and that when I look more carefully at other landscape artist’s this is obviously the case for most of them too. It seems an important part of the tradition. I’m just always a bit wary of being too conscious of tradition with regard to my own work, as if that may kill something more unselfconscious off for some reason.

John Constable, 'Salisbury Cathedral'

But these things are there to consider: from Constable’s relationship to Suffolk’s Dedham Vale, Graham Sutherland’s to Pembrokeshire, George Shaw and his native Tile Hill in Coventry, Diebenkorn’s Santa Monica and ‘Ocean Park’ abstracts, Hockney’s Yorkshire Wolds, or Alex Katz and Lois Dodd’s Maine or New York. Shaun Morris and West Bromwich doesn’t seem quite the same does it, but George Shaw and Tile Hill is a good example of how an artist can say so much about the seemingly inconsequential and overlooked place. But in a way, I think all the above artists do this: we now see these places through their art.

 Graham Sutherland, 'Fallen Lift Shaft'

George Shaw, 'Present and Correct'

David Hockney, 'Late Autumn'

                                          Richard Diebenkorn,'Yellow Porch'

Lois Dodd, 'Late November Afternoon'

Anyway, on Thursday I found myself once again underneath the M5 in the cold January sunlight, this time near Oldbury, at a spot I’ve had my eye on for a while; craning my neck as I drive over the bridge that crosses the canal beneath to catch a view of the striking reflections. When I got down there I discovered a great spot. The motorway pillars loomed much taller here, and in places were arranged like a dense concrete forest. The sunlight really animated the space with the long cast shadows, and strong tonal contrasts and bouncing light on the pillars themselves. The reflections were also incredible, with their offering of this deep spatial, upside-down illusion, which giddily draws you in. I’m going to fall in one day as I edge nearer and nearer. I just know it.

 I made an i-pad study of the flickering shapes and shadows on the perimeter wall of a large industrial plant that backed on to the canal, which held equal fascination. I also took some photographs and made some drawings to help me consider some compositional ideas. I hope to return there next week to do some further painting on location, but also would like to return in the evening to capture the sodium light from the motorway above reflected in the water.

 Walking out of a dark, low tunnel to experience these science fiction-like structures eerily rising up is not something you come across every day. There are lots of hidden things in the edgelands….