James Morrison Festival Exhibition catalogue, August 1991 David McClure
I first knew the work of James Morrison, when, as a young painter, he won critical acclaim for his paintings of Glasgow Streets and their decaying tenements. Somehow he distilled a kind of grim poetry from these ‘cruel habitations.’ During his Catterline period he was able to draw inspiration from Joan Eardley’s work of sea, fields and village, and yet he remained his own man. His mature style owes a debt to the work of D.Y. Cameron and other landscape painters of that time (as he readily acknowledges), but his is a fresh and original interpretation of fields, trees and skies. His technical fluency in dealing with the vast vault of the sky frees him to invest its towering clouds with a paradoxically vapourous and solid majesty. He manages, in a quite original way, to chart the architecture of the sky and its clouds. Although a townsman by birth and nature, he has a countryman’s insight into the quality of life on the land. Human figures may not be present, but the mark of man on the lands of the Mearns is clearly seen in calligraphic patterns he makes out of fields, hedges and fences. His new journey of the imagination into the splendours of Assynt is a sign of his questing spirit as an artist.
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Clockwise from top left: Winter, Catterline c.1963 Stake Nets, Montrose Beach, c.1966. Long line Fishermen at Catterline, c.1963. James Morrison in the Catterline Studio, c.1964. Hopeful on the beach at Catterline, c.1963.
