framed dimensions: 59 x 113 cm
signed and dated lower centre
EXHIBITED
Under a Northern Sky, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2024, cat. 15; Festival Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1999
Snowstorms over the Grampians, Montrose Basin would have been painted out of doors, not too far from home. This has been painted using the fast medium of gouache and watercolour. Morrison developed a particular technique which required immense skill and sureness of vision – this allowed him to record with speed, his medium allowing a wide range of brushmarks to express and record what was happening directly in front of him – the smooth calm of still water, the gathering clouds, the wide stretch of the Grampian landscape beyond which is about to be immersed under a blanket of snow.
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.