To celebrate the retrospective exhibition of the work of Adrian Morris, Audrey Morris writes about life with this distinctive, but often overlooked, British artist.
At last the show of my husband’s paintings, that he had been working towards for so long, is finally taking place. But he is not here to enjoy the satisfaction of seeing his work, painted over several decades (the last three in Clapham), exhibited in a West End gallery, the Redfern. He died suddenly and unexpectedly three years ago.
It is difficult to describe Adrian’s work because it is, as the art critic William Packer wrote “elusive of category, its own thing, minimal rather than minimalist, abstracted rather than abstract”. Adrian was acutely aware of the beauty and vulnerability of the earth, and the life-giving potential of its soil. He felt passionately about his work, but his paintings, which are in oil on gessoed wood panels – were built up slowly and painstakingly.
Early images are views of remote, sun-baked plains transversed by rivers or canals, later developing into internal views from a window-like opening on to desert land. Then follow buildings and interiors, doorways and windows – all tense and still; and finally a return to barren land, now on the planet Mars.
We met at a party in Chelsea in 1962. I was surprised to hear that he was an artist as he dressed rather conventionally, but I soon learned that he was anything but conventional in his outlook and in his painting. He was very amusing and rather eccentric. As a child he had lived in Somerset (his father was rector of a small rural parish) but being partly American he had spent the war years in the USA. There he attended a progressive school which encouraged his budding talent as an artist, and he was lucky enough to visit the studios of surrealist painters working in New York at that time, including Andre Masson and Yves Tanguy. This has a big influence on him. Back in England, after serving his National Service in the army he completed his studies at the Royal Academy Schools. Now he was teaching art as well as painting. I had always loved art and accepted with enthusiasm his offer to take me to The Tate to see a Francis Bacon exhibition.
A year later we married, and living just off the King’s Road we were at the hub of the vibrant 60’s Chelsea scene. Adrian seemed to know everyone and we seemed always to be going to or giving parties. After one party at our house Yoko Ono and her then husband Tony Cox and little daughter Kyoko stayed on with us for several eventful months: it was during that time she made her film about bottoms, and had the exhibition at which she met John Lennon. She was very serious about her work and extremely ambitious.
Space exploration and the moon landing inspired Adrian to paint a shimmering planet, and astronauts floating in space. He had had some early success in showing his work and in 1969 the Hanover Gallery included his paintings in a show The Poetic Image.
Then the move to Clapham in 1973. Our lease had expired and a move south of the river made economic sense. The children, Zara then five, and James four, were settled into new schools and Adrian found a part-time teaching post at a school in Tulse Hill. Visits to Dulwich Picture Gallery and Dulwich Park, just ten minutes away, were popular outings, Adrian always making a beeline for the Rembrandt portraits and Raphael saints. And I have photographs of Adrian and the children feasting on mulberries from the ancient tree in the gallery gardens.
At this time Adrian’s painting moved into an important new phase and in 1978 he was invited to exhibit a group of sixteen paintings at the South Bank’s Hayward Gallery, in a show alongside artists including Elizabeth Frink, Michael Sandle and Sandra Blow. This was a welcome exposure of his work because, although outgoing as a person, as an artist Adrian was very reclusive and didn’t very often exhibit or sell his paintings. We got by on his teaching salary and my work in PR.
Through the eighties and nineties he worked steadily and with great intensity in his studio, accumulating more than a hundred paintings, and only occasionally exhibiting. Drawers overflowed with drawings and sketches. With my encouragement (by this time I had retired) he became interested in exhibiting again and started to show his work to people in the art world. But then, alas, it fell to me and the family to carry the idea of an exhibition through to fruition. We were delighted when The Redfern Gallery was impressed with his work, and Adrian Morris – A Retrospective Exhibition now runs at their gallery at 20 Cork Street, London W1 from 13 May to 12 June 2008.
In the introduction to the catalogue, art critic Richard Cork writes that “Morris’s work speaks directly of the anxieties and hopes we now harbour about our planet’s state in the twenty-first century” and that “the paintings’ austere, hard-won and, above all, prescient eloquence deserves to be recognised today”.
I have to pinch myself to believe it’s happened at last!
More of Adrian Morris’ work can be seen on the Redfern Gallery’s website.
It was a thrill to stand in a room be surrounded by Adrian Morris’s work: over the years, with Audrey,we have shared friends, meals, music – but not his art. He was a perfectionist, thoughtful and intense – and his paintings are a vivid reflection of his personality. Apparently simple and
solitary, their texture is rich and complex and draws the
viewer in.
As Adrian’s son, it was a great privilege to see his paintings hanging at last. The gallery space is wonderful and really compliments the paintings which have enough light and space to be appreciated as individual works as well as part of a larger group.
Of particular interest to me is a small exhibition of the things that influenced him throughout his life. Mainly these are photos that inspired him (a good proportion from Time magazine and the like) and sketches for paintings that he was planning – but also objects that fascinated him such as stones and fossils. In fact, one might go as far as to say that searching for fossils on beaches as a child in Somerset was the root cause of his fascination with the ‘fragile planet’.
The theme that fossils represent is like a leit motif in his subsequent work. A constant but near silent and certainly invisible process of change incorporating destruction but then rebirth – continuing in endless cycles.
It is possible to see this in many of his paintings – a clash between the elements found in the natural world as well as the man made. We see the friction between earth and water, especially when it has been touched by human hands, but always the artist makes clear that we do not have full access – or indeed understanding – of what is in front of us. That is why so often a vista or landscape is seen through a porthole or window.
This is particularly apparent during the phase when he was fascinated by the moon landings. We could marvel, we could investigate and collect. But we would always be once removed from the landscape itself.
I feel a new-found enthusiasm and understanding of my father’s work and of course would recomend that people visit the exhibition and spend some time sitting in the central atrium of the gallery considering the world we live in and what Adrian Morris can tell us about it.