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framed dimensions: 45 x 55 cm
signed and dated lower right
Cloud over Torridon positions the viewer between earth and sky, with the Torridon hills anchored beneath an immense, rolling cloud mass. Painted in 1995, this small-scale oil on board pulses with scale and grandeur. The palette is cool, layered, and restrained, evokes not just the look but the feeling of the Highlands: the shifting air, the weight of moisture, the hush before a coming squall. The clouds are masterfully rendered, full of kinetic energy, as if moving toward us and overhead. Morrison returned often to this landscape, drawn by its changing light and towering geology, a place where land, sea, and sky seem in constant negotiation.
Morrison, who lived and worked for much of his life in Montrose, was deeply committed to observational painting, yet his landscapes always reach beyond representation. In Cloud over Torridon, he captures something essential and eternal: the grandeur of the Scottish wilderness, the solitude of place, and the sublime tension between transience and permanence.
PROVENANCE
Thackeray Gallery, London, 1995
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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