'Quiet Signs' at The Asylum Gallery

Here's a flyer from Asylum Gallery about my forthcoming exhibition, 'Quiet Signs', which has a preview on Friday March 15th from 6-9pm. I'm really looking forward to it. I'm going to be exhibiting a selection of work from my 'Negativland' series, alongside some brand new pieces. These new pieces are in a somewhat similar vein in their subject matter, which is based on the streets where I live,  but they also have a slightly different tone and formal approach. I'm not going to share any of them yet though, in the vain hope that you may be interested enough to want to come along and see for yourself. 

I'm also selling a book based on my drawings, which I have collaborated with my artist friend, Chris Cowdrill on....

'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…

Smell The Glove...!

It’s February already (I had hoped to write a lot more in January but I've been too busy to really think about it), and this coming Friday I will be hanging my exhibition at Rugby Museum and Art Gallery with a private view on Saturday afternoon. So without any further ado people, here it is- ‘Smell The Glove!’ Sorry, wrong reference..! Here is the press release and the flyer (above) that Chris Cowdrill has created for me as part of Indigo Octagon Projects. 

I decided to promote the exhibition as an Indigo Octagon Project as a way of nurturing the project further, and also with the intention of collaborating with other artists to try and add a different depth and texture to the exhibition than if I was just doing it on my own. Chris has designed a great pamphlet created from some photographs I’d taken and images of the paintings, which will be available for a nominal fee at the exhibition, and artist/writer Andrew Smith has written a terrific essay about the work . This is a piece of writing based on his own personal response to the work and conversations we have had. I will be also posting this on the blog, together with an introduction to the exhibition that I have written. For now though, this is the press release: 

                          Press Release

Stolen Car

New paintings by Shaun Morris

At Floor One Gallery, Rugby Art Gallery and Museum,

Little Elborow Street, Rugby CV21 3BZ

Tel: 01788 533201 E: ragm@rugby.gov.uk

Sat 9^th February to Thursday 21st February 2013

West Midlands based painter, Shaun Morris is pleased to present ‘Stolen Car’, an exhibition of recent paintings and drawings based on his nocturnal observations of the underside of the M5 motorway that circles the edges and borders of his native West Bromwich and Birmingham.

The work on display represent the artist’s first serious collection of landscape painting, and reflect his interest in depicting the so-called ‘edgelands’: the forgotten, overlooked, nowhere zones that exist between the city or town and the countryside. Feeling and experience are held in these vivid images that represent an individual and personal vision from this emerging artist, and his close relationship to this rarely represented landscape.

These large and dramatic paintings, which were created from studies made at night, invite us into a half-seen world where shards of the surrounding landscape are illuminated by the sodium lights that spill from the enormous, looming structures of the motorway above. The black shapes that represent the concrete pillars holding up these giant roads, serve to break up the picture surface and create a dynamic visual tension between dark and light, abstraction and realism, depth and flatness. The space depicted often appears ambiguous: one is not sure whether the space is positive or negative, where the structures, devoid of all detail, can at once appear solid but simultaneously appear as openings, or doors, into a depthless and unknown world.

You are warmly invited to the Private View on Saturday 9^th February 2013 from 1-3pm, where there will be refreshments and an opportunity to meet the artist. There is an accompanying booklet designed by artist Chris Cowdrill, with an essay by artist and writer Andrew Smith. This exhibition is supported by Indigo Octagon Projects and by funding from Arts Council England. 

We Carry On...

It’s December already. What happened there? The exhibition came down just over a week ago now. I was hoping to post something more about it but unfortunately I just haven’t had the time. It was a good experience and I was glad to be a part of it, and alongside some really talented artists. As many of these artists are friends, it seems wrong to critique any of their work in this context, but there was a great deal of things I really enjoyed exploring in greater depth during the days I invigilated the show. 

H R Smoke, 'Important Words Obscured by Smoke', acrylic on canvas

Chris Cowdrill, 'Fence', digital print

Craig Underhill, 'Oak', ceramic

Hugh Marwood, 'Shut 1', mixed media on panel

Andrew Smith, 'Tower', acrylic paint on photo on canvas

The only real problem was the venue, which, despite it being a great space, proved even more limited (and much more expensive) than we first imagined when it was booked. The industrial building which houses The Works Gallery is occupied by many artists, and I discussed many of these issues with one of the studio holders one afternoon when they came in. They frequently use it for exhibitions, and they shared a similar sense of frustration. Another visitor also asked if we were going to do more events there, but as we packed up on the Friday afternoon, Chris, Andy and myself all agreed we were not.

There seems to be a real paucity of venues for hire to support artists like this in Birmingham. It’s a shame because there is a real wealth of talent in the area that is not associated with Digbeth’s eastside, or at the other end of the spectrum, the RBSA. There is a more fertile middle ground of intelligent, challenging and skilful artistic practice that often goes overlooked. Artists like Barbara Walker, Graham Chorlton, and Paul Newman spring to mind.

 It was also good to see my own work on the gallery walls and out of the studio, which often can be as much an excuse to organise an exhibition as any. It is strange seeing the three above together at last. They are to be seen as a triptych, placing the viewer in various positions in relation to the enveloping dark space, so displaying them like this for the first time was exciting. I’m still particularly keen on the one on the left as I think it is the best one, but after a couple of false starts with other paintings that I have now scrapped, this piece was the first one I was happy with and kickstarted the direction of the others to this point. This is bookended by the most recent one (below) which I think is also very strong. It seems to bring together all the concerns with trying to balance the formal concerns with trying to create a strong sense of place, the abstract with the representational, and a dynamic interplay between the colour and the light within the image (if I say so myself!). It was also painted very quickly and has a fluency in the execution that I can see now was perhaps ‘rehearsed’ across the preceding paintings. I’m now looking forward to exhibiting the wider series in Rugby in February 2013.

'Licence and Registration, oil on canvas

The question that currently preoccupies me though is, “what next?”

And yes, the titles were hastily arrived at by shamelessly looking through all the Bruce Springsteen songs and lyrics written about driving cars (which is obviously quite a lot!), and pilfering lines that seemed to fit.