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The Millinery Works Gallery
GERI MORGAN - CLOSE UP - page 1
All measurements are in centimetres height by width
All works are oil on canvas
White Jug old Bottles 49 x 80
|
Aloe Vera 29 x 35
in the Big Chair 60 x 75
Silk Flowers 20 x 17 |
Geri Morgan is a painter of the most serious kind, which is to say that his engagement is with the world as he sees and feels it. And in all the long years of his career, and he is now in his 80s, it is an engagement that, for all the inevitable distractions of life and making a living, has never slackened. Of all the faculties, sight even more than speech is the most outwardly directed, and artists can only work by what they see. Only in their seeking to make sense of it do they differ. To each his own, and no-one can do everything. A brief but by no means unrelated digression into abstraction apart, long ago, Geri Morgan has chosen always to set his gaze in two particular directions: looking to the human figure, principally the female nude seen in a close domestic space on the one hand, and, on the other, to the still life. Until well into the last century, the human figure and the still life, whether singly or in combination, were always the essential study of the painter. Indeed there is no reason whatsoever, other than willful current ignorance and the prejudice that seeks to justify it, why they should not still be so. They may not represent all that can be of interest or indeed of use to the artist, but together they offer all that he may need, in terms at once of richness of imaginative stimulation and resource, close critical observation, and technical discipline. The only problem, if it is a problem, is that in either case, none of it gets any easier - which of course is true of any endeavour that, in any properly philosophical or moral sense, is actually worthwhile. "Say not the struggle naught availeth" and all that: the reward and mastery lie ever behind us, in reflection and retrospection, and ever onward and upward we go. Leaving aside the actual technical difficulties it presents, it has always seemed to me that the deeper and truer test that working from the life-figure in particular sets us, is one of understanding and empathetic recognition. For we are all living breathing figures ourselves, bodies of flesh and blood, and however accurate our observation may be, how long our practice and experience, and profound our technical understanding of the actual appearance and articulation of the body, we know by an even deeper instinct whether the image achieved, no matter by whom, is right and true. We know at once if it is wrong. The most rapid study may get it thus right, or as nearly right as is ever possible: the endeavour of weeks and months may fail. We may say of the tree or flower, the pot or jar, the bowl of fruit: "oh, but it was like that". With the figure there is no such excuse: we only have to look at it to feel the truth. Yet the still-life too is scarcely more forgiving. The problems are the same, save only for that shared universal identification with the body. For the still-life too is in and thus an image of the real world, writ small. Light, form and space are there to be considered no less acutely, and resolved in terms of line, colour, surface, texture. |
