THE late Scottish painter James Morrison – whose work is the subject of this superb retrospective at The Scottish Gallery – was an artist of exceptional insight and technical ability. A specialist in landscapes, his encounters with the natural world achieved an unusual profundity.
Spanning the entire seven decades of Morrison’s career, this show includes two early paintings of tenements in Glasgow, the city in which Morrison was born, and where he studied, at the Glasgow School of Art. Fascinatingly, the painting titled Glasgow Tenements (from 1960) carries within it signs of the great landscape painter Morrison (1932-2020) would become.
There is a roughness, tilting towards abstraction, in the painting that is simultaneously sinister and sympathetic. Extraordinarily for such a young painter, Morrison achieves a tremendous paradox in this painting, making the buildings appear to be both bleakly monolithic, yet also, somehow, fragile, like the lives of their unseen inhabitants.
The absence of people from his tenement paintings was a harbinger of the landscapes to come. There are no people, and, for that matter, no animals, in Morrison’s engagements with nature.
The only signs that humanity exists are the occasional dwelling here, a bridge there, and, perhaps, some farm fences. There is, in this, an almost political sense of the relative insignificance of the human race in relation to the vastness, diversity and infinite beauty of nature.
Take, for example, the painting of Achnahaird (2003). The Wester Ross landscape is dominated by the seemingly limitless expanse of sky.
The land, mountains and tumbling clouds are represented clearly, but – as in the landscapes of Joan Eardley, whose work was an influence on Morrison – they have a neo-impressionistic dimension. As in many of Morrison’s paintings, the artist shows his hand here.
The brushstrokes often announce themselves at the edges of clouds, which melt into abstraction. This is art, not as imitation, but, like the work of Van Gogh, as its own distinctive, energetic homage to nature.
Indeed, if one looks carefully at the early painting Salmon Nests, Catterline (1963), with its semi-abstract representation of a bridge, one can see points where Morrison has, Van Gogh-style, applied the paint to the canvas with luxurious emphasis.
Another early work, Field Boundary (1965), reverses the relationship between land and sky that we see in paintings such as From St Cyrus (1988) and Angus Fields (1990). Here, the land predominates.
Joined to a strip of grey sky, illuminated by a rising (or setting) sun, the field takes on a dynamic, abstract character. In later paintings, such as Westerly (2011), the blueness of the sky shifts, perhaps towards the mood of the painter, into violet.
This exhibition expresses magnificently Morrison’s passion for the extraordinary beauty and the awe-inspiring power of Scotland’s landscapes.
From the countryside around Montrose, where the painter lived for much of his life, to Eardley’s Aberdeenshire coast and the Western Isles, Morrison puts on canvas the stunning natural diversity of our small country.
Yet it never seems small. The painting Angus Fields (1990), for example – in which the sky is so vast that the clouds sit low in the picture – could be an expression of the seemingly never-ending geography of the Canadian plains or the Siberian steppes.
The painting of the great Highlands mountain Stac Pollaidh (1993), with its blue-black ridges clawing into the sky, expresses something of the spiritual connection that even non-believers, such as Morrison, often have with the Scottish landscape. In Dark Green Reeds (1992), the painter seems to capture the wind. The verdant, bending reeds appear to be in motion.
Much as the Scottish landscape gave to Morrison, and he to it, it is greatly to the benefit of art that the painter made four journeys to the High Arctic of Canada and Greenland. Large Berg II (1994) – an extraordinary icescape painted in two, large parts – has an extraordinary, bleak beauty.
Majestic, yet frighteningly vulnerable, though the iceberg appears, the most impressive aspect of the painting is its expanse of deep-black water. The pitch-dark sea – transfixing and surprisingly beautiful – is the dominant aspect of the picture. So dark is it, in fact, that it functions as a shimmering mirror for the berg itself.
In addition to showcasing the stunning range of Morrison’s work, this gorgeously curated exhibition includes a series of cabinets containing small art works and objects from the life of the painter and his beloved family. A very early painting of Mickey Mouse, for instance, points towards the young Morrison’s nascent talent.
In conjunction with the exhibition, the Edinburgh Filmhouse will be screening Eye of the Storm (Anthony Baxter’s acclaimed documentary about Morrison) – complete with a Q&A involving the painter’s son, Professor John Morrison – next Sunday (June 19) at 2.45pm.
For more details of the exhibition, visit: scottish-gallery.co.uk
For tickets and details of the screening of Eye of the Storm, visit: filmhousecinema.com
