Adrian Morris - Career

Career

Although a dedicated painter all his life, Morris was reserved in showing his work, but over the years he did exhibit at a number of leading London galleries, including the Hayward Annual in 1978 where sixteen of his works were shown alongside artists including Sandra Blow, Elizabeth Frink, and Stephen Cox. sketched ideas for paintings at every opportunity, especially when he was away from his studio, teaching. Dominating themes were the earth, its vulnerability to both natural and man-made disasters and the effect on its inhabitants.

Morris was inspired in the 1960s by the NASA programme and the views of distant, barren terrain seen through a spacecraft hatch. Although figures, such as astronauts, refugees, wounded soldiers and poor rural workers, feature strongly in preliminary sketches, they seldom survive into the finished works - as William Packer observed in The Times, the figures had gone "leaving a space or structure in which a figure indeed might be, but as an implicit presence". These, typically, are painted in oil on gessoed panels, which are pared down to the minimum, every square inch minutely considered.