The Problem of Nothing

by David MacWilliam

As I began thinking about my interest in Michael Morris’s paintings from the 1960s, I continually found myself open to a sense of longing and nostalgia. It was the period when Vancouver blossomed full-blown into an art scene, aggressively cosmopolitan, without that lingering sense of provincial isolation, envied by the rest of the country and unrivalled in its energy, vitality and feeling of the times.

Today, through the filter of time and history, that period seems so much clearer and coherent, and I find it easy, in many ways, to empathize with it. Michael Morris, however, as an active catalyst in the Vancouver art scene of the late 1960s, looks back with a certain detachment. While he acknowledges the importance of his early painting in setting up what were to be his continuing concerns as an artist, he sees them for what they are: early works by an artist whose career is still evolving.

The paintings of Michael Morris from that period epitomize all that I have come to associate with what was vital in Vancouver at the time. They are original, inventive, eccentric art works which comment with wry humour, intense colour, aggressive composition and intellectual detachment on their times. They are paintings which are fully conscious of their own history, both art historically and geographically. They were painted with verve and the determination that artists in Vancouver could produce art in every way as interesting as the three centres they saw themselves in relation to: London, Los Angeles and New York. Yet, as paintings, they retain a detachment and a privacy that the act of painting allows an artist.

Morris, through the intellect and eccentricity of his own ego, produced paintings which absorbed, refined and synthesized ideas that had currency at the time and gave formal solutions to contemporary theoretical problems: the problem of the limitations of the rectangular painting format and the historical conceit of the illusion of perspective.

Born in England in 1942, Michael Morris grew up in Victoria in an artistic environment where his mother, an art teacher, fed and nurtured her son’s voracious appetite for art with understanding. A child prodigy, with artists Maxwell Bates and Karl Spreitz as family friends, he studied for two years at the University of Victoria under Herbert Siebner before moving to Vancouver, to the School of Art, to study with Jack Shadbolt, Don Jarvis and Roy Kiyooka. He left Vancouver in 1965 with a Canada Council fellowship to do post-graduate work at the Slade, London University, where he studied with, among others, Ron Kitaj and Harold Cohen.

He began modestly in London, working on a new series of small gouaches painted on paper and card stock. Talking about these small gouaches today, he remembers that they evolved in part out of his fascination with the Indian miniature paintings he saw at the Victoria and Albert Museum shortly after arriving in London. These miniatures, with their small scale, flat design, painted frames and pure colour, were painted primarily with gum arabic bound paints, which was also the binder of the gouache paints he began to use, drawn to their flat, vivid colours and their immediacy. Over the next year in London, out of his small, cramped flat, he did a number of these gouaches, working out his ideas for future paintings.

The first gouache, The Problem of Nothing (1965) was Morris’s answer to the formal problems of format and perspective. A phallocentric column in oblique perspective sits on a flat blue bar “ground” suspended in front of a stylized curtain of chromatic stripes in graduated tonalities of reds, pinks and whites, flanked on both sides by white borders. Out of the top of this column is a comic strip style “talk” balloon saying nothing other than another field of horizontal green, yellow ochre and white stripes. The Problem of Nothing was at once a profound yet absurd statement, a new spatial sensation of ambiguous scale, ambitious yet opaque in meaning. It was a definitive statement for a young 23 year-old artist.

The Problem of Nothing gouache also introduced and established many of the formal motifs, devices and concerns which occupied Morris in his paintings over the next several years: the abrupt collage aspect of delineated areas butted against other irregularly shaped areas of colour; the opticality of the rhythmic patterning of these colour areas, with the stylized chromatic graduated stripes; the conceit of perspective and the acknowledgement of pictorial illusion; the oblique nonconverging perspective; and, finally, the irregularly “shaped” painting within the rectangular format.

These gouaches are more stylized, abstracted versions of ideas which evolved out of earlier concerns derived from the landscape and his earlier Vancouver School of Art paintings. After moving to Vancouver from Victoria as a student, the impact of the dramatic physical setting had an effect: “In Vancouver, the geography and the beauty of the place is a major influence on the development of your perception.” Morris saw the environment as a kind of stage for the theatre of life, with the landscape as a backdrop or curtain “in front of the activities of one’s ideas.” This premise became a compositional motif, but also gave a “sense of proportion and scale to the rest of the world.” This is literally revealed in Proposal Backdrop for the North Shore (1965). Morris saw this motif as clearly theatrical and read it traditionally as a frame within a frame.

The timing of his arrival in London in 1965 could not have been better. In the international forefront of music and fashion, the art scene was also thriving. British Pop Art, several years ahead of its American counterpart, had already evolved from its emergent stages in the late 1950s and, with the intersection of minimal sensibilities, matured into a complex visual amalgam of mass media and communication theory, architectural and environmental references.

These works may be about place, but place in a more intellectual and detached way. Like the younger British painters at that time, in Morris’s paintings the rawness of nature is “made into abstraction” as “the urban, the civilized and the decadent,” a “culturizing” of the landscape. Morris was a city-oriented painter, bridging a link between highly aesthete and art historical quotes and a highly styled urban abstraction distilled from popular culture and modern metropolitan life.

Morris absorbed and assimilated the ideas current in British painting, in particular the work of such artists as Richard Smith, who had a retrospective at the Whitechapel in 1966, with his more literary and intellectual approach to abstraction. Smith’s notions of annexing forms available to the viewer through mass media, leading to a shared world of references, can be seen as influential on Morris who, like Smith, used titles referent to cigarette packaging, advertising, pop and literary culture. Menthol, Rosy Crucifix, Surf City and Hollywood all rely on the sensibility and ethos of objects and themes in present-day life.

These issues, combined with the ideas taught by his teacher and friend, Harold Cohen, about the importance of the act of painting as an affirmation, an act of personal responsibility free of outside authority, essential in an increasingly impersonal environment, led Morris, like his teacher, to abstraction. In his paintings, symbols and forms are generalized and function like ciphers with allusive references to archetypal images; they invite numerous interpretations. Both artists utilize strong colour, mysterious and evocative, allusive and metaphoric, inseparable from the shape it occupies, as a dominant quality in their paintings. Colour structurally identifies relationships between elements with these fragmented, dislocated forms syntactically setting up patterns of opposition within the picture.

Morris also had an acculturated sense of colour. His colours came from advertising, photography and lithography. Green was the felt green of a pool table; blue was from a cigarette package. This makes perfect sense with gouache paints, as gouaches are the materials of the graphic designer. As opposed to the dictates of traditional colour theory, Morris would choose colours for his paintings from a candy wrapper or a perfume advertisement.

Returning to Vancouver during the summer of 1966 and helping Harold Cohen (who was en route to San Diego) install his exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Morris began working as acting curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery. In the autumn of 1967, he began curating and lecturing at the new Simon Fraser University in the Centre of Communications and the Arts.

As he had originally planned, the gouaches were studies for larger paintings. Now, back in Vancouver, he began making the paintings. The first, The Problem of Nothing (1966), won a purchase prize in Painting ’66, the Vancouver Art Gallery Centennial Award exhibition. The second painting, Plexus (1967), which won a $2,000 prize at the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Perspective ’67 exhibition, also began with an original gouache, Plexus (1965), which initially appears radically different. Closer examination reveals that the original gouache has simply been rotated vertically and its mirror image has been reflected to form the right side of the painting. The graduated tonalities of the rolling chromatic blue bars operate optically more as figure on a red, yellow, blue and olive green horizontally striped ground, interrupted occasionally with cutaway tubes of blue, abruptly turning right angles on themselves before disappearing. This reflected image makes for the new bilateral symmetry of this large abstract winged emblem.

During the autumn of 1966, Morris began exhibiting his works commercially at the Douglas Gallery, a small frame shop and gallery that Doug Chrismas was running in Vancouver’s West End. After the one-man exhibition of his gouaches at the UBC Fine Arts Gallery in February 1967, during the Festival of the Contemporary Arts, several new themes began to emerge in Morris’s paintings. The new Cinema Series evolved out of Morris’s fascination with Hollywood, movie houses, marquees and what he saw as the “dehumanization of the cinema,” as exemplified by the elaborately baroque Busby Berkeley musicals of the 1930s. Morris admired the extravagance and decadence of these spectacles and evolved an elaborate number of pleated shapes and fan motifs, stepped ziggurats and grids, blunt curves and rounded ends that functioned as elaborate metaphors for an eclectic indulgence in the “collective narcissism of the period.”

These references of the architecture of the jazz-moderne movie palaces and the “silverscreen” reveal his nostalgia and admiration for this period and can be seen as implicit stylistic references in a number of works: Avenue of the Stars (1967), Screen Test for S.F.U. (1967), Boxed Venus (1967) and a number of prints and multiples. Footlight Parade (1967) is perhaps the best and most explicit example of a complex combination of these motifs. Morris’s interest does not imply any moral judgment of these spectacles, but rather he uses abstraction as a way of allusively dealing with his fascination.

The glamour and glitter of Hollywood, as well as California’s “custom car” phenomena, also influenced Morris to shift his colour palette to include gold and silver paints and to begin experimenting with sprays, enamels and lacquer-based metallic paints. In 1967, he made contact with a custom metal fabricator off South East Marine Drive in Vancouver who, working to Morris’s specifications, fabricated a number of large ten-inch-wide by three-inch-deep steel “borders” or “frames” to frame his paintings. Then, using whatever custom car colours they were currently using in their painting booth, they would spray-paint these frames with baked enamel or metallic lacquer finishes. An excellent example is Captain January (1967). Here, the painting, an abstract stripe painting of alternating blues and mauves in a graduated progression of tonalities, is brilliantly framed in a rounded metal box, painted an optically bold metallic lime-green gold.

Though his paintings were originally landscape-based, he now had more in common with the cool intellectual or conceptual painters loosely grouped as systemic painters. From Captain January and the paintings which followed, Morris became increasingly abstract, formal, classical and much less eccentric, and more involved in ideas of systemic and serial painting current at that time. In particular, ideas of pattern and repetition can be seen consistently throughout his work. The repeated patterning of forms—the thin, soft lines or stripes, side by side, graduated chromatically—set up particular inner relationships within the painting’s structure and yield a symmetrical syntax, rhythmically linear, rolling across the picture plane.

Though 1967 to 1969 were years of international exposure and acclaim for the young Morris, who was still in his mid-twenties, he remained an intensely private person and appreciated the private activity of painting, particularly in relation to what he saw as the “homophobic nature of North American society.” We might read this privacy implicitly as the symbolic meaning behind the curtain motif and the tentativeness of his brushwork. From the first gouaches, each thin-lined brush width of colour and the slightly awkward shakiness of the artist’s hand discreetly reveals the artist’s personality and approach to painting.

Morris kept his scale very private also. The gouaches are all very small, of course, and the majority of the paintings until 1968 never got beyond the scale of easel painting. In 1968, however, a new confidence and success led to the increase of scale to a much more public, institutional size, with the eight Letter paintings and the two large Untitled triptychs (1968).

These paintings can be seen as the culmination of Morris’s early activity as a painter. The two large Untitled triptychs are each ambitious and monumental, and equally ambiguous in meaning. In Untitled (1968), the left panel of pink circles and bars is set in relation to the central grey vertical bars with orange and red wedged shading and a right panel of vertical stripes of pink-mauve and blue.

With the Letter paintings (1969), Morris explicitly introduced his final motif of the mirror, with vertical Plexiglas inserts which literally placed the viewer into the painting. The formal frontality of the painting is interrupted by the gaze of the spectator reflected in the painting. The sensuous painted surface is undermined by the interruption of the mirror and Plexiglas insets mounted as V-shaped troughs in which the viewer suffers the dislocation of the fragmented reflection of his or her own image. This formal device divides each painting into three sections. The reflective surface upsets the atemporal nature of the painting and unites it with a very temporal reflection of contemporary reality. The use of the mirror, a symbol of self-consciousness and narcissism, remains a device which continued to interest Morris throughout his later work.

Though he continued to show and sell paintings out of Doug Chrismas’s renamed Ace Gallery on Davie Street, with exhibitions in 1970 and, finally, in 1971, Morris had more or less stopped painting by 1969. Over the next several years, he became very involved in working collaboratively with other artists and did research into photography and film, started Image Bank and the Western Front. Morris became more and more interested in other media-related arts—photography, film and video—but these interests evolved naturally out of issues arising in the Letter paintings.

In 1971, he made two gouaches and a two-part painting, which the then recently formed Canada Council Art Bank bought, new versions of The Problem of Nothing (1971) gouache—this time, a black and white with a pastel rainbow “talk” balloon and grey scale to one side; and the second, a rainbow spectrum coloured version, again with the same pastel rainbow “talk” balloon. These two gouaches were then stacked in a vertical diptych for the painting, The Problem of Nothing (1972). These three works offer a kind of resolve, a formal summation or coda, to Morris’s paintings of the period.

Vancouver and contemporary art has changed a great deal over the past 20 years. And while Michael Morris’s paintings from the 1960s have the look of their time, they also have qualities which transcend it, retaining their original integrity and making them interesting today. They are fresh and vital, sensuous paintings that are inspiring, yet personal. They reveal an artist intelligently synthesizing ideas with inventiveness and originality, yet discreetly retaining a certain detachment in expressing what fascinated him about life. But, as paintings, their true beauty is that they made the young Michael Morris part of the vital place that Vancouver was in the late 1960s, yet allowed him to retain his privacy in relation to that world.

Notes

1. This essay is reprinted from Michael Morris, Early Works 1965–1972, a catalogue from the exhibition at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, September 19 to November 24, 1985 and the Vancouver Art Gallery, January 25 to March 23, 1986. (Victoria: Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, 1985.)

2. Michael remembers doing some 30 or 40 gouaches altogether between 1965 and 1969, with perhaps half of them done while in London.

3. All quotes are taken from my conversation with the artist in July 1984, December 1984 and July 1985.

4. Conversation with the artist in July 1984, December 1984 and July 1985.

5. Conversation with the artist in July 1984, December 1984 and July 1985.

6. Conversation with the artist in July 1984, December 1984 and July 1985.

7. Editor’s note: The Harold Cohen: Recent Paintings and Drawings exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery was April 12–June 1, 1967. Cohen was also introduced in the London: The New Scene exhibition (October 30–November 28, 1965).

8. Title named after the second book in Henry Miller’s trilogy of semi-autobiographical novels, Sexus, Plexus and Nexus. Editor’s note: The work cited as Plexus (1967) in this essay is in the Collection of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Canada, and titled Emblem (1966).

9. Conversation with the artist in July 1984, December 1984 and July 1985.

10. Conversation with the artist in July 1984, December 1984 and July 1985.

11. Screen Test, Footlight Parade, Vavin, Palomar, Babylon and Motown.

12. See exhibition catalogues and essays from Lawrence Alloway’s Systemic Painting at the Guggenheim Museum in 1965 and John Coplans’s Serial Imagery at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1968, as reprinted in Artforum, September 1968.

13. Certain works comment specifically on works by other artists Morris empathized with: the cross of the Rosy Crucifix gouache (1966), and the central area in The Gate (1966), for example, can be seen as direct quotes from Frank Stella’s Copper Series of 1960–61 and a horizontal version of his earlier black painting, Arundel Castle (1959).

14. Conversation with the artist in July 1984, December 1984 and July 1985.

15. Editor’s note: The author is referring to Los Angeles Letter and New York Letter, both from 1969.

16. Primarily Vincent Trasov, Gary Lee-Nova and Glenn Lewis.