Margaret Morrison | |
---|---|
Born | 1960 (age 63–64) Utah, U.S. |
Alma mater | University of Utah |
Known for | Paintings |
Margaret Morrison (born January 1960) is an American fine art painter and professor. Morrison is a tenured professor of drawing and painting at the Lamar Dodd School of Art, the University of Georgia (UGA).
Morrison, born in Castlepark, Utah in 1960, was the youngest of six daughters. In her formative years, she lived in the Philippines and traveled extensively through the Middle East, Asia, and Europe.
Morrison received a B.F.A. in 1981 and a M.F.A. degree in Drawing and Painting in 1986 from the University of Utah. [1]
After developing her style and exhibiting at an artist run gallery in Soho in New York City, she was contacted by John Woodward from Woodward Gallery in 1994. [2] She continues to show her work through the Woodward Gallery.
In her solo exhibition, Theory of Flight and Painting (2000) at Woodward Gallery, Morrison's surreal figures expressed flight on several levels. The predominant figure in the paintings is man in a white lab coat. Morrison's "professor" served as a visual mentor who elucidated flight as a metaphor for life. In her 2003 exhibition, Centricity, Morrison's characters gained life experience. They turned inward, exploring their unique natures while contemplating the paths before them. The white lab coat became a symbol of self-awareness. Morrison's subjects were at different stages of their awakening. Morrison incorporated the rich, early encounters with art history in her body of work entitled, Patron Saints and Rituals (2005). Each of these paintings invited the viewer into a mysterious and complex world where ancient rituals, religious symbolism and contemporary concerns intermingled.
Morrison was diagnosed for breast cancer in 2008 and is now a breast cancer survivor. A notable shift in her subject matter and color palette was evident as a result of this life changing experience. Her 2009 solo exhibition, Larger Than Life, became a visual celebration of life. The dark, somber palette was replaced with jewel like colors, sparkling with high intensity. Morrison turned to imagery that, for her, became physical and psychological therapy. Sweet treats and comfort food on a massive scale predominated her paintings. Smithsonian Magazine commented, "The artist paints, well, larger-than-life canvases of gummy centipedes, chocolate bonbons and other sugary delights. I think I got a cavity just looking at it." [3] In 2012 Morrison relived her childhood world of imagination with giant robots, enormous pull toys, life size dolls, and Fisher Price people for the Child's Play Exhibition.
Morrison's work has recently been featured at the historic Four Seasons Restaurant in New York City, at the Flinn Gallery/Greenwich Library in Connecticut, Yellowstone Art Museum (YAM) in Montana, and as part of the American Embassy in Tel Aviv, Israel for the U.S. Department of State, Art in Embassies Program. [4]
Margaret married Richard Morrison, a UGA chemistry professor, in 1980 and they have four children. [5] Morrison is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. [5]
Elaine Marie Catherine de Kooning was an Abstract Expressionist and Figurative Expressionist painter in the post-World War II era. She wrote extensively on the art of the period and was an editorial associate for Art News magazine.
Alice Neel was an American visual artist, who was known for her portraits depicting friends, family, lovers, poets, artists, and strangers. Her career spanned from the 1920s to 1980s. Her paintings have an expressionistic use of line and color, psychological acumen, and emotional intensity. She pursued a career as a figurative painter during a period when abstraction was favored, and she did not begin to gain critical praise for her work until the 1960s.
Lois Mailou Jones (1905–1998) was an artist and educator. Her work can be found in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Muscarelle Museum of Art, and The Phillips Collection. She is often associated with the Harlem Renaissance.
Margaret Leisha Kilgallen was a San Francisco Bay Area artist who combined graffiti art, painting, and installation art. Though a contemporary artist, her work showed a strong influence from folk art. She was considered a central figure in the Bay Area Mission School art movement.
The Lamar Dodd School of Art is the art school of the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Georgia (UGA) in Athens, Georgia, United States.
Keith Anthony Morrison, Commander of Distinction (C.D.), born May 20, 1942), is a Jamaican-born painter, printmaker, educator, critic, curator and administrator.
Helen Hyde was an American etcher and engraver. She is best known for her color etching process and woodblock prints reflecting Japanese women and children characterizations.
Margaret Frances Bacon was an American artist, best known for her satirical caricatures.
John H. Safer was an American sculptor. Safer's varied career spanned work in theater lighting, television, real estate, politics and banking.
M. Jean McLane, was an American portraitist. Her works were exhibited and won awards in the United States and in Europe. She made portrait paintings of women and children. McLane also made portrait paintings of a Greek and Australian Premiers and Elisabeth, Queen of the Belgians.
Hollis Sigler was an American artist. She received several Arts Lifetime Achievement awards as both an artist and an educator, including the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement from the College Art Association in 2001.
Janet Fish is a contemporary American realist artist. Through oil painting, lithography, and screenprinting, she explores the interaction of light with everyday objects in the still life genre. Many of her paintings include elements of transparency, reflected light, and multiple overlapping patterns depicted in bold, high color values. She has been credited with revitalizing the still life genre.
The Woodward Gallery is a contemporary fine art gallery that opened in April 1994 under the incorporation G.O.L.A, Inc.. The inaugural exhibition was held in Times Square at the Roundabout Theatre Company. It is owned by John Woodward and Kristine Woodward.
Amy Pleasant is an American painter living and working in Birmingham, AL.
Jane Wilson (1924–2015) was an American painter associated with both landscape painting and expressionism. She lived and worked in New York City and Water Mill, New York.
Margaret Tomkins (1916–2002) was an American Surrealist / Abstract Expressionist painter. Though born, raised, and educated in Southern California, she spent most of her life in the Pacific Northwest, where she was well known both for her art and her energetic, outspoken art activism. Her Surrealist works of the 1940s earned considerable national attention, and as her work evolved in the 1950s and 1960s, she came to be known as a pioneer in Abstract Expressionism. Tomkins was the driving force behind the first artist-owned gallery in Seattle, Washington. Though friends with many of the artists of the Northwest School, she denied any artistic connection to these "mystic" painters, at times deriding their claims of quasi-magical inspiration from nature as "silly". She was similarly dismissive of any categorization based on her gender.
Robert Heindel was an American painter, illustrator, and stage designer best known for his paintings of dance and performing arts. Heindel created over 1300 paintings and drawings of dance and performing arts during a twenty-five year period in the late twentieth century. He was described as the best painter of dance of his time.
Anjum Singh was an Indian artist whose works focused on urban ecology, environmental degradation, and her own struggles with cancer. She was born in New Delhi, India, and she continued to live and work there. Singh was the daughter of noted Indian artists Arpita Singh and Paramjit Singh.
Ann Orr Morris was an American silversmith, goldsmith, and enamelist. She died in her hometown of Athens, Georgia, the victim of a triple homicide.
Joan Wadleigh Curran was an American visual artist, painter, and printmaker active in Philadelphia, known primarily for her figurative paintings and drawings in which she addressed the intersection of the natural world and human intervention. Between 2001 and 2016, Curran served as Senior Lecturer in Painting and Drawing at the University of Pennsylvania.