Word: canvasful
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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In this case, the foreground counts most. It is a simplification, but not a gross one, to say that Morley and the late Philip Guston were the twin unlatchers of "new figuration," at least in America. Morley was an expressionist artist when most of the current crop of neoexpressionists were...
Then too his character must be reckoned into the burgeoning myth. Morley's reputation as the last wild man of the art world grows and grows. Stories about him proliferate and are often true: a jail sentence in Wormwood Scrubs as a young man, the rages in the broken...
The paint on the canvas looks sluggish and frozen, like cake icing. (In the early '60s, Morley did put the pigment on with icing nozzles.) Its dull turbulence parodies the violence implicit in expressionist paint handling. The heavy brush stroke is no longer an index of earnestness; it quotes...
Instead of accepting the glossy impact and impersonality of mass media at face value, Morley rants against them. That is the main difference between him and the Pop artists with whom he was associated in the 1960s. It was not obvious at once. When he first emerged as a painter...
By the early '70s Morley's painting was largely about violence happening to a spuriously calm surface. In Los Angeles Yellow Pages, 1971, a jagged rip appears in a huge Los Angeles phone-directory cover, thus eerily predicting the city's real 1971 earthquake. A postcard scene...