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I have painted still life off and on throughout my career but I really started concentrating on it about fifteen years ago… I became much more conscious of the formal values that a still life can actually give freedom for – so that I began to look at still life from this point of view, not simply depicting a few apples or oranges or a couple of jugs and so forth, as a kind of theme – but simply the relationship of the shape of a jug to the shape of a compote or the shape of a pear or the colour of a few objects on a white tablecloth against something in the background. You can actually use the shapes within a still life just as you would in any abstract because they don’t necessarily have to tell any story – apart from their own existence. From that point of view I think it’s a very valuable part of any contemporary artist’s work, if he or she is a figurative painter. – Alberto Morrocco, 1997
Alberto Morrocco was born in Aberdeen to Italian parents in 1917. He attended Gray’s School of Art from the prodigious age of fourteen, tutored by James Cowie and Robert Sivell, and won the Carnegie and Brough travelling scholarships, affording him opportunity to paint and study in France, Italy and Switzerland in the late 1930s. After serving in the army between 1940-46 he devoted his time to painting. His subject matter varied from the domestic interior, landscape, imaginings of Italian life, still life and many commissioned portraits. Combining his talent with abundant energy he became one of the most dominant figures in the Scottish artworld in the second half of the 20th century. David McClure succinctly explained: ‘Alberto painted as an Italian operatic tenor sings, that is with a passionate theatricality and always con brio. Alberto Morrocco was the subject of a centenary exhibition at The Gallery in August 2017.
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