James Morton

James Morton

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University: UWE
Graduation Year: 2006

New Blood Art Commentary

James Morton’s work is imbued with the exciting and reactive immediacy of capturing a person at a specific moment in time. Characterful faces form the main terrain in which colours are manoeuvred across the canvas, using a variety of tools and techniques. Winsome, thoughtful, melancholy, and focused; each face expresses the panoply of emotions available to humankind. These are thinking faces, painted with a respect and care that Morton has fostered through dedication to his own curiosity into human expressions. Often starting with a photo, the final image leaves the photo to become something else entirely, as Morton uses gestural marks to push and pull individual features into an even deeper truth.

Artist Statement

My work evolves from an interest in people, and a basic need to capture an expression at a given moment. I use old photographs of people in everyday life, and the people i see around me. Aiming to depict a vunerability, or melancholy, these paintings often take on an ethereal quality.

Although each painting starts from an image, the relationship between the marks takes over from the original photo, which is then rarely referenced again during the painting process.

I use gestural mark-making, manouvering the paint with different tools to manipulate the surface, creating definition and texture; pushing and pulling different features to the forefront of the painting to obtain balance.

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