Foreword Guy Peploe

Foreword

This celebratory publication looks back over the long career of James Morrison and attempts to pull together the many strands of a life dedicated to art. A vital part of this dedication over seven decades was his relationship with The Scottish Gallery where mutual trust was a key component of the art business and a strong, honest working relationship helped to deliver his exhibitions to a wide and appreciative audience. A poem comes alive in the reading, music in the performance and a painting needs to be seen. Morrison really only wanted to paint but recognised he also needed to show. Jim was a nervous father to his painted progeny, often too close in the process to feel able to judge a new work and in the lead-up to an exhibition a studio visit was looked forward to with a kind of dread.

The visit was ostensibly to select new work but was also a huge privilege for The Gallery representative, mostly myself over the last thirty years or so. I would drive up to Craigview House just south of Montrose and join Jim in his studio across a courtyard from the house. Coffee would be brewing with ten or fifteen oil paintings on board pinned to the wall. Each would be considered and discussed, the artist’s insights on each invaluable to The Gallery and comments in return, invariably positive, apparently welcome to the painter. A simple lunch in the conservatory would be followed

James Morrison painting in Angus, c.1973

by a careful loading into the back of the car, the newly varnished works interwoven with great sheets of release paper. This was how it worked after the artist signed an exclusive contract in 1985 which delivered the security of a regular income and allowed him to leave his teaching position at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art. In the decades prior to this, and before I started at The Gallery, there was a mutual respect in tandem with regular one-person shows, milestones in the painter’s life: working in Glasgow, Catterline, St Cyrus, the Mearns and then the West Coast saw his practice and confidence grow. The relationship with The Gallery allowed him to choose the times he could travel and he made expeditions to Canada, the Arctic, Botswana and more locations in Europe. Jim’s deep anxiety about his work persisted and his wife Dorothy and their children were the first to be interrogated for their opinion. But he never doubted the value of his métier – painting was important, the history of art was Morrison’s world, only his own value in it was a subject of doubt. That doubt has long since been banished and today looking back in affection and wonder at his brilliant legacy of painting this celebration heralds a new era of appreciation for James Morrison.

GuY PEPLOE The Scottish Gallery