'Black Highway'...

I’ve been feeling very lost since I made my last painting, ‘Drift’, and installed my exhibition at Nuneaton. I’m usually ahead of myself, always thinking of the next painting, but recently I’ve been left thinking, ‘well, what is the next painting?’…It’s not like me at all.

I had a small private view for ‘Black Highway’ on Saturday afternoon, which turned out to be a nice event thanks to the friends and family that made it along. I find it increasingly difficult to attract people along to any private views I have, but I do have a little hardcore of about half a dozen friends that always thankfully make the effort. These gatherings around my paintings seem to turn into really nice occasions where these great people, who don’t meet very often, come together for an hour or so and catch up with each other. It's nice to think my paintings can serve such a function.

The response to my work has generally been very positive from friends and others, who have left comments in the visitor’s book. I managed to sell two small pieces on Saturday (a small painting and a pastel), and was very surprised at the strong reaction the largest painting, ‘The Gaze’ (above) seemed to generate, with people really enjoying the more overtly abstract qualities of it, as well as the colour, in particular the green square. The discussions around this piece helped me begin to focus again. And it was a surprise, as I felt that these abstract qualities might have been the most difficult for people. It has encouraged me to think more about this. 

I’ve also managed to get together another accompanying pamphlet for the exhibition, which was designed and created by my good friend, illustrator Chris Cowdrill, which you can view online here:

http://issuu.com/indigooctagon/docs/black_highway

 or buy  at the exhibition. Chris as ever, has done a very sensitive and sympathetic job. It’s much sparser than the last one for ‘Stolen Car’ in February, with the only writing a poem that I have written. This is something new for me, and took shape after a failed attempt to originally write a short essay for the publication. The poem seemed a better form to boil my ideas down to their essence, which is very much how I think about painting. I’m grateful to friend, artist Andrew Smith for reassuring me it wasn’t too embarrassing to print.  I’ll share it in another post.

This is another Indigo Octagon publication, of which there are now three. I think it would be good to do a few more of these in some way as a group and link up with some sort of fanzine fair at some point. 

And today I found out that I also managed to get a review in the Birmingham Mail online. It’s pretty good too, especially the bit about my exhibition/paintings being money well spent for the Arts Council! Here’s a link:

http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/whats-on/whats-on-news/midland-artist-captures-regions-motorways-6523188

Thanks to those who made it along on Saturday. Your support and interest is very much appreciated.

'Black Highway'

‘Black Highway’, my latest exhibition of paintings and drawings opens at Nuneaton Museum and Art Gallery on Saturday. After a rather fraught day delivering the work on Monday (loading the van up with big canvasses in howling wind bubble wrap flying down the street, painting still wet, van not big enough, needing then to make two journeys, then getting lost to Nuneaton! (terrible at directions!) and heading to Coventry, display walls not the same as gallery plan I was given so then having to re-plan, mirror-plating 33 pieces until the gallery closes at five), I’m now feeling like a huge weight has lifted from my shoulders. I’m not sure what I’ve achieved, but I was very pleased with how the paintings looked in the gallery space. I think it’s the best I’ve seen the earlier motorway paintings look. After laying everything out, the gallery has been hanging them over the last two days. I see the exhibition for the first time on the same day as everyone else, when I go along this Saturday when it opens.

At the top of the post is the rather cool flyer my talented friend, Chris Cowdrill, created for the exhibition. He’s currently working on an accompanying ‘catalogue’ that will be available at the exhibition too. Following is an introduction I’ve written for the exhibition: 

Black Highway

Recent Paintings by Shaun Morris

‘We arrived where we started and know it for the first time’

                                                                                                                TS Eliot

This exhibition represents paintings made over the last two years with the support of a research and development grant from Arts Council England. These are my first serious attempts, after many false starts and blind alleys, to explore landscape painting following many years of painting portraits and the figure. Despite the obvious absence of any figures in the paintings I hope that the human presence is even more felt than before, but this time it exists in you, the viewer, who finds yourself transported to the painted places before you. 

  

My original intention was to explore the so-called ‘edges’ of the landscape; the nowhere zones between city and countryside; the overlooked and hidden. I planned to work on location in many places in the Midlands; and even took myself to Scandinavia, to Norway and Denmark, to fulfill an ambition to make work overseas. Ironically all the paintings on display in this exhibition were made from a landscape I have known all my life, just five minutes from where I was born and grew up. It is the landscape underneath the M5 and M6 motorways that take you right over West Bromwich, and the canals and towpaths that weave below, precariously traversed at night. 

 

As a consequence of exploring these places I have known, and yet not known, all my life, the paintings found themselves containing many personal memories and feelings. The more recent paintings of the canal reflections also found themselves representing a more political dimension. This was provoked by the recent death of Margaret Thatcher, and the barely healed wounds it seemed to expose in the community I grew up in.  The Black Country has never recovered from the devastating effects her policies had on the industrial landscape and lives of the people there.  When I travel through it now, there is a sense of an abandoned, or ruined and forgotten, landscape, which possesses its own bleak beauty. 

If there is one lesson I have learned in the last two years, it is that you never have to look far for inspiration. It is all there to be found in your own backyard.

I’d like to thank the following people for their advice, support and generosity over the last two years:

Chris Cowdrill, Andrew Smith, Jamie and Mette Wallace-Christiansen, Danny Bird, Laura Gale, Angela Swan, Marian Edwards, Hugh Marwood, Rob Williams, Ben Allchurch, Andrew Tift, and especially my wife, Diane. Oh, and Bruce of course….

Shaun Morris, January 2014

Hope you can make it along…

...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.