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This ambitious painting, Salmon Nets was painted the year after Morrison had moved from Catterline to Montrose in 1965 and most likely depicts St Cyrus beach. Since arriving in the northeast from Glasgow, Morrison had been drawn to paint aspects of the local fishing community and boats and nets provided ample subject for the young painter, the salmon season operating between February and August of each year. In this work, the tangle of nets and receding upright posts draws the eye into the picture plane, and outward towards the sea and opaque sky beyond. It was at this moment that Morrison was perhaps most closely aligned with the work of his friend and contemporary Joan Eardley. Soon after Morrison’s move to Montrose, he began to experiment with a new visual language with a focus on the underlying formal qualities of the landscape.
James Morrison sadly passed away in 2020. He was a great painter and a huge part of The Scottish Gallery for more than sixty years, the last thirty under an exclusive arrangement. His kindness, generosity and loyalty made him a hugely rewarding friend, and it has been a privilege to represent one of Scotland’s most distinctive and brilliant painters.
Born in Glasgow in 1932, Morrison studied at Glasgow School of Art from 1950-4. After a brief spell in Catterline in the early 1960s, Morrison settled in Montrose in 1965, joining the staff of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee the same year. He resigned from Duncan of Jordanstone in 1987 to paint full-time and since then his work has been exclusively available through The Scottish Gallery. Whole-heartedly a landscape painter, his main working areas are the lush, highly-managed farmland around his home in Angus and the rugged wildness of west coast Assynt. As well as Scotland, Morrison has had extended painting trips to Africa, France, and Canada, including three trips to the Arctic in the 1990s. A suite of his Arctic paintings were acquired and exhibited as part of a major exhibition, Among the Polar Ice at The McManus in Dundee (September 2019 – March 2020).
James Morrison first exhibited with The Gallery in the fifties, and over the course of his career, he enjoyed over twenty-five solo exhibitions with The Gallery, which also organised several one man shows elsewhere in the UK and internationally. In June 2022, The Scottish Gallery celebrated the life and work of one of Scotland’s most-loved artists in a major retrospective show James Morrison A Celebration 1932 – 2020. The exhibition, held two years after his death, presented work from the entirety of his artistic career which spanned seven decades.
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