Made of thin brushed paint, Morley's chromatically forthright canvases are vaguely akin to Stanley Whitney and the less formal and abstract Philip Guston, avoiding tight precision, espousing not rigid repetition of perfect squares but instead celebrating soft round corners, wobbly edges, stacks of thin layers and odd squirty-pointed extrusions. Bold muscular colour is combined with confidently stacked forms deliciously piled up, initially like stone walls with scoria blocks tightly squeezed together but surprisingly also incorporating long strips that bring a strange tension, and funny little perky trapezoids.
Like Ōtepoti Dunedin artist, lecturer and musician, Michael Morley, this writer arrived in the second half of the twentieth century, and quoting his blurb, absorbed: “Enough to begin to understand the looming spectres of empires and imperialism, the banality of evil and the exquisite brutality of oppression masquerading as culture.”
Like Michael Morley, I can see that “News channels are the new library of contemporary thought: allowing access to the images that once were conjured from dark minds and the depraved.”...
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