THE term “beauty” is one Newcastle artist John Morris is reluctant to use, but it best describes the force behind much of the acclaimed painter’s work.
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“Beauty is a term that was maligned badly over the past 30 years," Morris said.
“I find it hard to put my hand on, or to know when a painting has it. I find it the most elusive thing to hunt down.
“It’s almost like you are born with five images in you and you exploit them, maybe less than five, and you find them and repeat them in various ways, and look at the world through that filter.”
Atmosphere and weather are themes, or perhaps touchstones, repeated throughout Morris’s work.
“Landscape is basically a way of talking about things you know are real, but things you can’t see. It’s just a vehicle to go, ‘What’s loneliness or isolation like? What’s longing like, or distance?’” Morris said.
“If you use landscape as a vehicle for telling stories and you don’t make it topographical, you don’t let it get railroaded by narrative or the specific. If you take it further away from that and disassociate it from the known. Like water runs down a hill and there it levels into a river or a lake. The cause and the effect, that the atmospheres will either burn or dump water and they will weather and they will form the landscape and change it. You can be witness to that, you can get tempered by it.”
This month Morris held an exhibition in a pop-up art gallery in Parry Street, Newcastle. A stand-out work was Rooftop Pool, a dark and mysterious painting featuring the rooftop swimming pool of the Adelphi Hotel, Melbourne.
“It’s in Flinders Lane, they have a lap pool on the top floor with a glass bottom which is over the street, you can look down on people as you are swimming, it’s weird,” Morris said.
“The whole idea of lap pools is very modern, it’s about fitness, there is no frivolity, you go in there and you swim.
“When I got up there, there was no-one up there and it was all lit up. I took up a few beers and did a few sketches of it and enjoyed it.”
After years overseas Morris returned to his home town Newcastle. From the late ’80s he taught art for 25 years, eventually becoming a Head Teacher at the Newcastle Art School (TAFE). His tenure there ended when the school was gutted by State Government cutbacks in 2014.
And although the artist acknowledges the loss of the job has challenged him it has also renewed focus on his own work.
“I dedicated an enormous amount of my life to it [teaching], and you just work really hard in a place and be inventive and love it,” he said.
