Paul Morrison was born in 1966 in Liverpool. In 1998 he graduated with a Postgraduate Diploma and an MA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College of Art. Since his first solo exhibition in London in 1996, Morrison has exhibited internationally in numerous museums and public galleries.

Morrison is best known for his large monochromatic botanical landscapes that are at once both familiar and foreign. Whilst the trees, flora, and their natural surroundings are immediately recognisable, the individual elements are often disproportionate in size: a dandelion becomes threatening due to its immense size; a huge tree is shrunk down to the miniature. Morrison takes his inspiration from a wide range of references including Renaissance woodcuts, botanical illustration, Pop Art, and cartoons, to create abstracted and complex visions of landscape. He lives and works in London.

Glossary

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

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