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….