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.

 

'Ever Tried. Ever Failed. No Matter. Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better'

I like to exhibit my work and try and communicate with an audience, but really it’s just the act of painting, or creating something, that drives me on. This seems much more so as I get older. I like thinking about something, and then developing it through drawings and studies and other things, and then trying to make a painting. When I’ve done that, I hopefully get to the point where I believe I’ve nailed it in some way, but usually by the next day I’m thinking about the next one. Let’s face it, most paintings I make are exhibited briefly and then are largely hidden away and rarely looked it after I’ve made them. I think these feelings of ambivalence are pretty normal for most artists. I think the gallery experience often feels like something you feel you should have to do, rather than something you want to do. With these feelings in mind, I’ve been painting over a few older paintings lately, or taking them off stretchers to reuse the frames for new work.

I completed this painting last night. It’s taken about a year to complete, but I finally completely re-painted it in about an hour. It just suddenly felt like the right time.

Still Game...

Hurvin Anderson at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham

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You’re really spoilt for choice for great painting exhibitions in the region at the moment, with terrific shows by Hurvin Anderson at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, and Ged Quinn at New Art Gallery Walsall. 

 Ged Quinn at New Art Gallery Walsall

I visited the Ged Quinn show yesterday, being only vaguely familiar with his surreal and theatrical landscape paintings, but this exhibition also presented some peculiar still lives and portraits. All of the work is some sort of riff on different traditions, or genres, and historical periods in paintings and heavy on complex narrative that can often be alienating in certain artist’s hands, but not so here. I’m not really interested in narrative painting, but with these works there was a sense of inclusivity and openness that drew you in to the strange symbolic buildings, objects and figures that occupied the appropriated romantic landscapes of hills and woodland, rivers and forests. You didn’t feel you had to know exactly what all these things meant or stood for to enjoy the work and bring yourself to it. A lot of the work reminded me of the late, great Scottish painter, Steven Campbell, whose dense narrative paintings were also often humourous and rewarding, but with a more off the cuff technique than Quinn’s more slickly painted works. A sign of the times.

 

Ged Quinn

--> These qualities were far removed from Hurvin Anderson’s paintings at Ikon, whose paintings were lush and rich with great and varied painterly expression, experimentation and command. The landscape in most of Anderson’s paintings was that of his adopted home of Trinidad, although the view always seemed to be seen at a distance, through wire fences or windows, always just out of reach, which created a dark undertow to the light filled large canvasses. 

 Hurvin Anderson

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The execution of the paintings was just very exciting, with a sense that the artist would leave no stone unturned in exploring the myriad possibilities of oil painting to realize his vision. My favourite paintings in the show were a suite of works called ‘Peter’s Room’, set in a barbers shop. These were a series of repetitive paintings with only subtle differences between many of them, before the introduction of a figure in the later ones, representing the marking of time in this communal space. The revealing layers of paint and the zones where edges and shapes met and overlapped or collided are the things that really excite me (which is like some sort of sad confession).  The painting that I most enjoyed though, perhaps unsurprisingly, was a large black and grey urban scene of a street in what rightly or wrongly I’m presuming was Birmingham (top of the post)

 

 Hurvin Anderson

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I’ve been making some spontaneous small paintings of my own in the studio in the last two weeks, with a view to present them alongside the larger paintings in January’s ‘Black Highway’ exhibition.  If you are in the region I'd recommend these shows.

Mulled Whine...

'Catherine to Claire', Richard Diebenkorn

I’ve been mulling over lots of things lately with regards to my painting (I’m a good muller. Sometimes it is the only thing I can or have the time to do when the pressures of work and family take over). I’ve also seen a few good exhibitions, and been trying some new things.

One of these included a recent staff development in mixed media painting lead by artist Jenny Muncaster. I’m not very experienced in mixed media painting as it is something I’ve not had much interest in relation to my own work. Despite having a BA (Hons) and MA in Fine Art, Painting, like most artists much of what I’ve learned in the craft of my practice is self-taught and lead by my personal interests. Anyway, I really enjoyed the day and really found Jenny’s enthusiasm inspiring, and discovered lots of new techniques, which my students have been trying with great gusto ever since. It’s really opened up their work, and broadened my own delivery of teaching painting, which is what I was seeking.

So many artists/lecturer say you can’t ‘teach’ painting, meaning students either have it or they don’t, but I think this is a load of nonsense and history proves this. It’s just a lazy and unimaginative attitude to teaching. The more formal teaching I’ve received is the stuff that has carried me furthest, and this approach underlies much of my own work with students. It’s the poetry that is harder to teach.

Richard Diebenkorn

Much of the work with Jenny involved building up the surface of the painting using layers of paint and texture. I’ve enjoyed doing this too, and some of this is creeping up into some of my experiments in the studio as I begin to develop some of the work made in Scandinavia with greater conviction. Some of these are also influenced by the paintings of Richard Diebenkorn, who has appeared more seriously on my radar of influences lately. A recent visit to the studio by artist Hugh Marwood picked up on the shared ‘zones’ of colour (a major trait in Diebenkorn’s paintings, as well as the layered surfaces) and tonal banding in the motorway and Scandinavian paintings, which I found an encouraging connection. It’s helped me pick up and start to take these things on as a starting point. Liz Hawley, the arts consultant I’m currently working with, also commented last week that the Scandinavian paintings were also just as rooted in the edgelands, both geographically and psychologically, which I hadn’t been seeing. This feedback is great and spurs me on.

I went with Liz to see a small exhibition of painting at Nottingham Castle last week. The work was from the studios of local Nottingham painters, and had some great qualities and a serious engagement with the media on one hand, but much of the style and subject matter however, seemed to epitomize much of the concerns currently floating around: a deliberately off-handed, loose handling built on naïve illustrative drawing and lots of images of animals or creatures involved in some obscure narrative setting- a bit folk arty and a bit quirky. A bit predictable too. Still, it was good to see evidence of what appeared to be a more vibrant and collective painting scene than exists in Birmingham. 

'Labroffesson', Thomas Fearnley, oil on canvas, 1836

In November, I visited the Thomas Fearnley exhibition at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts. Fearnley was a Norwegian painter born 1802-1848, and toured Europe painting spectacular landscapes of the fjords, mountains, glaciers, forests of Scandinavia and Western Europe. It obviously had appeal because of my recent trip to Norway, but the exhibition also featured many of the ‘plein air’ studies painted by the artist. Much is made of the seeming ‘freshness’ of these in compared to the larger studio works, but I never see much point in this: of course they are fresher and contain a spontaneity simply because of the circumstances of their making. The studio works are a different beast altogether, and need to be if they are going to become their own thing. I liked the larger works: they contained a vigour and charge which seemed forged into a unique and individual vision. 

Thomas Fearnley

The same could be said of the Fiona Rae exhibition over at New Art Gallery, Walsall which I also enjoyed. Full of complex and playful formal ideas, these large scale and colourful paintings really celebrate the endless possibilities of painting as a continuing creative mode of expression. 

Fiona Rae, 'Untitled (Yellow), oil and acrylic on canvas, 1993

I’ve seen many exhibitions of Rae’s work over the years, and I must admit I prefer the qualities that seemed to exist in the earlier works, where the skidding and slipping marks seemed to possesses a less self-conscious autonomy, than the ones on display in Walsall which feel more deliberately constructed or ‘built’. There were two paintings though, a little smaller than the others and better for it, which seemed to have been over-worked, more heavily-laden with paint and surface, that tipped into a more uncomfortable, almost ugly state of being that I thought were much more interesting. Their scale seemed to confront you more at eye-level which I found unsettling and gave them a much more powerful presence in the room. I’m thinking a lot about scale at the moment….

'As I Run And Run Happiness Comes', Fiona Rae, oil and acrylic on canvas, 2009

I've been revisiting Counting Crows' 'August and Everything After' album lately. It's on heavy rotation at home, in the studio, and on the i-pod. With sublime songs like 'Round Here', 'Time and Time Again', 'Rain King', 'Sullivan Street', and well, all of them basically, it just seems the perfect record to lose myself in the last month or so...