The Scottish Gallery will be opening 2020 with a bold retrospective of the great Scottish landscape painter James Morrison.
From Angus to the Arctic will be the artist’s twenty fifth show with us, and includes recent and retrospective works of Angus where Morrison has lived since 1960. Morrison first came to Catterline in 1960, a move partly inspired by the presence of Joan Eardley and the beginning of a lifelong love of the varied landscape of The Mearns. Also included in the exhibition will be selection of paintings from his three Arctic expeditions, created between 1990 and 1996. These Arctic paintings will be hung alongside as a counterpoint: one group reveals a changing, vulnerable landscape of ice and water; the other, something far more ancient, but carrying the history of man in its fields, hedgerows and hamlets. Morrison’s painting is beyond representation and remains relevant to whichever sky under which he has worked.
Exhibiton catalogue
The artist Phil Braham, who is a former student of James Morrison and is now Programme Director for Art & Philosophy at Duncan of Jordanstone, has written an insightful, personal essay for the exhibition catalogue, giving a new appraisal of the artist and his work.
Philip Braham, 2019James Morrison’s gaze is fixed to the distant horizon, to that narrow zone where forms are diminished and obscured by the blue haze of our atmosphere. He reaches towards the transition point where sky meets earth in all its limitless variations, and makes sense of it anew by holding steady to his penetrating vision, translated by an articulate touch into paintings that transcend the observable in the here-and-now and incorporate an ineffable sense of the always-and-forever.
James Morrison at The McManus: Dundee's Art Gallery & Museum
The McManus in Dundee is currently showing Among the Polar Ice, and exhibition of artwork selected from Dundee’s nationally significant fine art and whaling collection. The exhibition showcases a small but growing collection of polar artworks which spans 200 years. At its heart are a suite of Arctic paintings by James Morrison, acquired from The Scottish Gallery in 2018.The exhibition runs until March 2020.
