Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti saw the objective of art as an effort not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.
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On Friday, July 1, an exhibition of oil paintings by Newcastle artist John Morris opens at The Owens Collective, Islington. The works depict the intensity of the Hawkesbury River, but perhaps not the reality.
The Hawkesbury is a location familiar to many Novocastrians, whether it is a glimpse caught from a Sydney-bound train or time spent afloat on watercraft. We know this location. Its cascading sandstone escarpments; its deep - sometimes crystalline, sometimes muddy - waters. It's a mysterious place that materialises precolonial Australia. However, this body of work, titled Fleeting, goes back even further in time. It's elemental and this is a signature of Morris's art.
"You can ascribe all kinds of histories and stories to the Hawkesbury, but really, the works are about the play of light and dark," Morris says.
"The common runner in all of them is the river. Given the chance, I will take away every human element on the landscape so that it doesn't have that narrative. They are almost like landform paintings, landform tended by the elements as it did forever and continues."
Two winters ago, Morris spent several days on a houseboat on the Hawkesbury River. "We floated, me and the houseboat, down the river. In a quiet spot I anchored there for a couple of days. I wasn't in a hurry," he says.
"I just wanted to see what it was like to be in one spot ... to take a look at it; watch the tides and how the sun would break through the escarpments.
"Getting up early to complete fog, just white fog, and then it breaking up as the morning light touched it."
The riverboat experience is central to his new exhibition. The body of work continues the artist's preoccupation with natural beauty. This concentration sees him sometimes capture the same subject repeatedly.
"If I see something I think is exceptional, then I will try to use it again and again in compositions," he says.
Many of the paintings depict a single morning on the Hawkesbury and Morris says the process of painting was an attempt to recall what he saw and experienced.
I try to be ready to get a record of it somehow; things I see that I think are unusual or have a strange beauty of them. Things that when you look back in half an hour are gone, like a passing storm.
- John Morris
The paintings possess an ephemeral quality. It is as though the artist is attempting to make a sense of the moment last forever by applying oil paint to the board or canvas.
"Watching things appear and reappear, disappear, and change. The ongoing state of things, through weather or events, natural phenomenon, captures my imagination," Morris says. "Things that are strikingly beautiful and other worldly. Things that ask you about the strangeness of the earth, the incredibleness of it.
"It's awe-inspiring and humbling. It says something about scale, my scale against the world."
Morris is always on the watch; ready to make a record of the natural world when it beguiles him.
"I try to be ready to get a record of it somehow; things I see that I think are unusual or have a strange beauty of them. Things that when you look back in half an hour are gone, like a passing storm."
The commonality that links all of Morris's work is how he sees the world.
"I have the same lens that I view the world through. It's just how I look at the world and I keep pulling bits out that fascinate me and they could be anywhere in the world."
The works in Fleeting are moody, emotionally atmospheric, and low key. While beautiful to the eye, they are also weighty and remind the viewer that life is temporary and there is an inevitable force behind our existence.
"My works tend to hint at death and demise, but I think that the river can't help but look like that," Morris says. "Just with its flow and feeling the pull of the tide. The force of the body of water moving relentlessly towards the ocean is a big force.
"When you are anchored, you get swung in one direction and then grossly swung in another direction by the force of the river, and the river is gouging its way. It has an all-persuasive energy to it.
"In parts of the Hawkesbury, you are quite narrowed in and weighed down by escarpments. A lot of the time the river is in shadow. It's shadowy land and you know there are blue skies that day when looking at blue stripes of light reflecting on the dark waters - the sky running over the dark escarpments."
These moments on the Hawkesbury are captured in the majority of the 26 works in this exhibition.
Morris is an accomplished painter, who can paint portraits and abstractions.
But, he repeatedly returns to landscape painting. "I find painting is relentless. It will gain its next direction, or find its next self, through what you did before. If I find something in my investigations of landscape that works, then I will want to know why it works and I will produce more paintings about that," he says.
Morris uses thin applications of oil paint to layer and build-up while contrarily he strips back the subject - the landscape itself - to its most basic components, almost figments.
"What if I paint virtually nothing? How much of nothing can I get away with? There is fog settling into a valley until there is virtually nothing to be seen. Could that make a painting? It's stunning and beautiful, so why can't it?
"I try to answer these nihilistic questions and these states of being or appearing and reappearing. I tend to gravitate to more of nothing than more of something, and my something tends to be more of nothing."
Fleeting, July 1-10, at The Owens Collective, Maitland Road, Islington.
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