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'My aim is, as it has always been, to create from a tabula rasa something which even if it is only, as it were, a fleck of dust, is at least a reality coming from my own searches rather than borrowed experience.' Adrian Morris
'The paintings' austere, hard-won and above all prescient eloquence deserves to be recognised today. Virtually unknown during his lifetime, apart from the moment when he displayed sixteen paintings at the Hayward Annual '78 exhibition, Morris only had one solo show. Temperamentally incapable of self-promotion, he found the process of seeking an exhibition impossibly difficult. Yet he did want to show his work, and we now realise that it speaks directly of the anxieties and hopes we harbour about our planet's fragile state in the twenty-first century. Although sturdy buildings stand erect in a few of his panels, they look ominously windowless and defensive. Are their occupants managing to survive? Morris does not answer this question, but most of his paintings dispense with architecture in favour of battened-down storage bunkers or deserted expanses tersely entitled Barren Land.' Richard Cork
(extract from Richard Cork's catalogue introduction to 'Adrian Morris 1929-2004, A Retrospective Exhibition', Redfern Gallery, 2008)
'This painting impressed me with its curious almost unnatural luminosity. I remember it as both powerful and withdrawn, its energy contained, turned inward. It was a landscape, apparently of a sun-baked plain, wth a low horizon and open sky. It exuded a sense of deep longing which I both understood and shared .. I honestly believe that Adrian's paintings are the profoundly ascetic works of a compassionate and deeply social human being.' Liliane Lijn
'The art is shocking in its apparent simplicity. Subjects such as the refugee; a military compound in Cambodia or a bunk house transformed to a cool simplicity; an unemotional aerial view of an underground car park or an airstrip; urban non-spaces or the barrenness of much of contemporary architecture suggest an historical geographer's project .. The work mesmerizing the viewer long after the assault, accomplished by the profound dialogue Morris has set up between himself and the paint.' Patricia Scanlan
'His final painting, Rocky Outcrop, looks like the profile of a dark chair; a wooden gap in the earth or the sun, with a hard rock sitting as a symbolic expression of a final message in which between wounds, scars, memories and hard rock-like experiences, something sublime can break through.' Salomon Resnik
Obituary - The Times
Adrian Morris, painter, was born on May 18, 1929. He died on December 6, 2004, aged 75. A meticulous painter who exhibited rarely but was much admired by a discerning circle of his peers.
Adrian Morris was a distinctive and distinguished painter. He was also hardly known beyond a narrow circle of friends and colleagues. That he contributed to his own obscurity is beyond doubt, but in no sense was it in a perverse or negative way. Though, like many, he was nervous of the reception his work might receive, he would always show if he was ready and the opportunity was there. Although he worked incessantly, it was simply his nature to work privately and with an extreme thoroughness and deliberation, so his production was small, and slow in the process. He sold little, it was more from a desire to maintain the integrity of the work as a corpus, than a reluctance to part with the individual piece. A sole one-man show in Cork Street in 1957, and a handful of group exhibitions, is the sum of his exhibiting career.
The last such outing was in the Arts Council's "Hayward Annual" of 1978, as one of 23 artists selected by fellow artists, and with a room to himself. Indeed, while he had always enjoyed the respect of artists who knew his work, on the rare occasions that other art professionals penetrated the fastness of his studio, invariably they too would leave impressed.
"I know I've got something," he would say, with characteristic emphasis. Only it is work elusive of category, its own thing, minimal rather than minimalist, abstracted rather than abstract, worked always with a scrupulous address to the matter of the painting, not just as an image but as a thing. The boards, always his support of choice, were always specially made, and he lovingly laid on the gesso ground himself. The "matiere" of the paint was no less important, built up into a rich but never indulgent impasto, its every square inch of surface minutely considered. His palette was restricted to a close harmony of buffs, ochres, greys and browns, low in tone, the mood one of quiet but oddly unsettling contemplation. But his imagery, however simple, had always to be about something, or rather somewhere, as he put it, "in which someone might live". Out of his student drawings of life model and life-cast of the early 1950s, perhaps, had come by the 1970s a form in which a single, often apparently emaciated figure, was isolated in a close but unspecific space.
By the later 1970s, however, the figure had gone, leaving a space or structure in which a figure indeed might be, but as an implicit or potential presence. It might be a room, a compartment, a cell, or, increasingly as the years went on, a broader space seen often imaginatively from above -an enclosure, a bunker, a rampart, a courtyard, a barracks square, a desert.
Adrian Grant Morris was born in 1929, the youngest son of the Rev Arthur Grant Morris, curate at St John's, Smith Square, in Westminster, and subsequently Rector of East Quantoxhead in Somerset. A fondly-remembered country childhood ended in 1941 with the family's submarine-haunted Atlantic crossing to the United States, whereupon Adrian was sent to the progressive Putney School in Vermont. There, by now 14, his burgeoning talents as a painter were actively encouraged. Indeed, according to his fellow pupil and lifelong friend, the American painter, Bradley Phillips, he was allowed to paint pretty well all the time. What little survives shows not just a precocious awareness of Surrealism, but imaginative assurance and technical sophistication far beyond his years. Certainly they were enough to attract the attention of the Harvard Professor of Poetry, John L. Sweeney, through whom the young Adrian was to meet Andre Masson, Yves Tanguy and Jean Helion. It was through Sweeney too that the family came to know T. S. Eliot.
Back in England, a short stint at the Anglo-French Art Centre in London, where Llote and Lurcat were teachers, was followed by National Service in the Royal Horse Guards, not, as perhaps expected, as an officer, but as a corporal who remembered rather enjoying barking out orders on parade. Having learnt to ski in Vermont, he was at one point whisked away to join an army ski team in Switzerland, which jaunt was not altogether appreciated by his comrades-in-arms, who made sure that he was in trouble for the slightest thing ever afterwards.
Once free of the Army, he entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1950, where he remained for three years, and, his assiduity in the life room apart, is remembered for his habitual sartorial elegance, in reaction perhaps to the informality of his earlier career, and for his quietly patrician geniality. His fellow students also held him in some awe for his connections and the balls and parties he regularly attended. Through his friend, the painter Michael Wishart, he met his first wife, Penelope Dendy, whom he married in 1956, and with whom he had a son. After an interval in Brighton, they set up house and studio in Chelsea. The couple divorced in 1961, and in 1963 he made what was to prove a lastingly happy marriage with Audrey Baker, with whom he had a daughter and a second son. In 1973, they moved from Chelsea to Clapham, where they remained.
Reclusive in his work, he was never the recluse in his social life. Through the Sixties Chelsea years, he was a giver of memorable parties, and he was a longstanding and popular member of the Chelsea Art Club. His interests were wide and cultivated, with music a particular love, and he was a voracious reader, especially of biography. But his abiding passion was for genealogy, "ma faiblesse" as he would say, and not just for his own line, but for any that intrigued him. His wife and children survive him.
Copyright The Times, 2004
Obituary in The Independent
Dec 17, 2004, by David Buckman
Sarah Kent's essay in the Hayward Annual '78 catalogue
Modern man is alienated from himself, from his
fellow men and from nature ... human relations are
essentially those of alienated automations ...
everybody remains utterly alone, pervaded by the
deep sense of insecurity, anxiety and guilt which
always results when human separateness cannot be overcome.
Eric Fromm's view of contemporary life is a horrifyingly bleak one in which each person is trapped in the isolation of a body that is an impenetrable barrier to communion with other people or his environment. These paintings by Adrian Morris can be regareded as ananalogue of this state of anxiety, in which the almost abstract shapes and colours have specific and litereral meanings matched by symbolic readings that signify states of mind. 'My paintings reflect something of the continually changing relationship between that which lies within and without.'
The coloured border of the pictures represents the interior of a twentieth century craft or metal structure, such as an oil rig, spaceship, submarine or aircraft. Equally, though, they stand for the psychic interior of one's mind or body from within which one looks out onto the world; while the central openings can be understood literally as metal framed windows, or metaphorically as the portal of one's eyes. Through these openings the view is of an aerial landscape that is at the same time a purely psychic space or a projection of the mind within. 'We necessarily experience the world through our bodies - we have, as it were, a view from a house of blood, either in darkness or filled with light, looking out on terrains both hostile and seductive.'
'Outside' one simply sees a clear blue sky and oblique expanse of yellow desert bathed in the hard, bright light of North Africa or the Middle East at different times of day. There is no sign of animal life or plant growth: 'I want vegetation to grow, but it never works': and no natural water, only occasional reservoirs or canals. Other minimal traces of a human presence are sometimes indicated as lines or grids on the desert floor, which resemble the religious drawings made by Peruvian Indians on the high desert plateau or the land art made by American sculptor Michael Heizer in the Nevada Desert. The markings on Adrian Morris's deserts are purely functional, but whether they represent irrigation ditches, tracks, oil fields or airstrips is rarely stated, nor can one tell if they are newly built, in use or abandoned, since no other signs of human activity appear for comparision. One is left to speculate whether man has just arrived to reclaim these desolate places or if the craft are escaping from some disaster, such as a nuclear was, that has devastated a once healthy environment. Man's role is open to interpretation, then, as either a destructive force or a creative and nurturing one - except in two earlier paintings. These are based on aerial photographs of the Vietnam war and of Hiroshima after the bombing, in which man is clearly presented as a cruel and negligent power. In the more recent Distant Landscape a reservoir indicates a new development in the desert, and mankind is portrayed in a more positive light as a constructive agent for good. This image of pioneering work in remote places often acts as a metaphor of exploration into the mental or physical unknown or as the artist described it: 'journeying out into space as far as the mind can go and one can physically follow, while at the same time retaining one's roots in the earth - man must and will migrate further.'
Equally few clues are given concerning the conditions that prevail literally and metaphorically, mentally and physically 'out there'. Whether an atmosphere exists which can support life, and if the air is fresh or contaminated with radioactivity, are problems left open to question. And since one's relationship to the outer world of the pictures is in doubt, one's feelings about the inner world, represented by the coloured borders, is also ambiguous. They might be protective womblike enclosures or cells that claustrophobically imprison the psyche. These frames change colour sequentially to indicate a changing state of mind. The sickly pale orange of the earlier paintings, a nauseous and pessimistic colour that represents lethargy and fatalism, gradually gives way to warmer, redder hues that indicate a growing optimism and energy.
For the sixteen pictures exhibited form a narrative sequence, described by the artist as 'an obsessive attempt to find life in the dust', which functions on several levels of meaning concurrently. The first image shows a desolate place - the 'tabula rasa' of the earth's surface in which a cut has been made. This digging down into the soil is a 'searching in the dust for new life, or rather for the understanding from which it may be created.' As the sequence progresses, signs of life increase little by little, and the colours of earth, sky, water and frame all brighten and intensify to indicate a general physical and mental improvement.
Adrian Morris's work cannot easily be located in contemporary art. He works in isolation in the London suburbs and is also artistically isolated. As a young man in the United States he was deeply impressed by the Surrealist paintings he saw in Peggy Guggenheim's gallery, Art of this Century, especially de Chirico's uncanny, empty cityscapes whose influence is still evident. On his return to England he continued to develop his strange brand of symbolism and the British artists that impressed him were Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud who were, at that time, just becoming established.
Adrian Morris's world view as expressed in his pictures can be regarded as cynical, realistic, visionary or naïve depending on your own position. But despite the stress and anxiety which some of his paintings show, he feels an underlying optimism rather than an existentialist 'loss of hope' - as he wrote 'For me painting has been an attempt to create an environment in which life could exist.'
Sarah Kent, 1978 |
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