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GEORGE MORGAN
Recently I’ve more and more wanted to break away from my foremost art form, painting. I’ve continued to make 2-dimensional work but have consciously limited my use of oil paint and instead have been trying out materials that are less familiar to me including bitumen, varnish and other domestic products. I’ve also been working with collage, found items such as maps and pages from books, and 3-dimensional objects. I’m finding this a less restrained approach to materialising my ideas and I’m enjoying it a lot.
Some months ago I went to Denmark where I stayed with my friend, Lise Hoveson, in her grandmothers remote summerhouse by the sea. Shortly after, I spent some time in my own grandparents equally remote ‘beach hut’, a prefab chalet on the shores of Southampton Water that was put up for evacuees during the Second World War. Throughout my short stay in Denmark we seldom left the summerhouse or came into contact with anyone. We read, listened to Danish folk music, prepared and ate traditional cuisine and took walks to the nearby lighthouse, museums and junkshops. These experiences, and the summerhouse itself – situated close to the sea amid a vast, flat area of rugged grasslands and lakes, gave me a sense of the country’s heritage and seemed to me to encapsulate all the quietude and mysteriousness I’d expected of Denmark. The beach hut is similarly surrounded by rugged grasslands and marshes, which since my stay there have developed in my mind a relationship with those surrounding the Danish summerhouse. I spent my days at the hut reading, beachcombing, drawing and photographing the sea and distant views of Fawley Power Station and the Isle of Wight, and walking along the cliffs and coastal paths. I felt nostalgic being in a place that for many years has existed to me only in vague memories of family holidays there when I was a child.
I left each of these places feeling quiet and introspective. The work here can be seen to reflect my two experiences.
