James Morrison had his first exhibition with The Scottish Gallery in 1959 and this show of new and earlier works will be his twenty-fourth with us.
The presumption must be that if a relationship between a galley and an artist works it will persist, but also that in selecting its artists for exhibition the gallery is not influenced by what is à la mode, in a world constantly over-heated with wolfish interest in novelty. Instead the gallery should support and trust an artist in their endeavour while the artist will gain momentum from the process of exhibition, contemplation and renewal of work. In this way generations of art lovers have been introduced to Morrison and over the decades as his work has developed many have continued their interest and enriched their collections with works as physically disparate as The Gorbals and Ellesmere Island and as psychologically separate as Notre Dame Cathedral and the battlefields of the Somme. Today physical challenges have arrived uninvited and been overcome and the central motif of the artist, an inner eye that can recognise universal truths in nature, is unaltered and as striking and original as it was in 1959.
