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The Millinery Works Gallery
GERI MORGAN - CLOSE UP - page 2
Four Pots with Casket 45 x 65
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Vashti with Red Carpet 61 x 87
Symmetry 78 x 51
Vashti with Guitar 89 x 63
The Dance25 x 44
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And always the work itself will set those terms. For it is never a question ever of the answer predetermined. Nor is it one of simple fidelity to what is seen, and accuracy of transcription. The truth is always what the work requires it to be, the artist never sure that his answer is right. And what he arrives at will always surprise him. The painting, the work, must always be allowed to be true to itself. Such are the problems and mysteries which Geri Morgan has so happily confronted over all these years, relishing the very difficulties of the engagement even as they frustrate and confound - as they inevitably will, if that engagement is true. For it is always something true, never the mere effect, for which the artist searches and, as an artist, it is by that search he grows. Quietly, slowly, Morgan continues to grow, his work modest in scale but hardly modest in its ambition. He sets his still-life on shelf or bench - assorted fruit and veg., and pot, a bowl, a jug or two - the space closed off by the studio wall, the arrangement simple in its frontality. It is a formal schema that comes close to abstraction, in the pictorial puzzle it sets - tone, colour, structure. That abstract digression of the 1960s proves itself no digression at all. And in all of this, while remaining close to what is there before him - a blue remains a blue; a green a green - Morgan gently frees the painting to be itself, an equivalent reality, in the sharpness of its tone, its heightened colour and, overall, its clarity of vision. His approach to the life model is much the same, the space once again closed off, shallow and closely organized. Yet not, perhaps, so closely organized as all that. For there is to it too an air that is more domestic, relaxed, intimate. Not always is the model presented full-on, as in the still-life. The chair or couch may be set off at an angle, and she asked simply to set herself down entirely at her ease, to make herself comfortable. The formality remains, but it is a formality easy and unforced. And that perhaps is where we find Geri Morgan now, in his impressive maturity as an artist, comfortable in his classicism, unforced in his formality of approach, but as serious as he ever was in his commitment, and as determined as ever, every day, to look anew, and to move on in the work. William Packer October 2009h.
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