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James Morrison is widely recognised as one of Britain’s finest landscape artists. As the documentary by award winning Director Anthony Baxter opens, Morrison faces his greatest challenge: his eyesight is fading fast, and he has one more major painting to complete. From his studio just outside Montrose, Morrison can hear the crashing North Sea… This poignant and beautiful film is now available on DVD for £12.00.
“My sight has quite badly deteriorated,” Morrison admits. “And the very thought of coming in here and not being able to pick up a brush and do something with it really terrifies me.” After being side-lined by a series of operations, Morrison agrees to let filmmaker Anthony Baxter follow him as he picks up the brushes again at the age of 85 in this insightful and moving reflection on an extraordinary artistic life.
Region: 2 (UK PAL)
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 recently 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. 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. A new exhibition Under a Northern Sky opens in The Gallery in April 2024. This show will contain a remarkable collection of Morrison’s Scottish subjects, many drawn from private collections.
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