GEORGE GUNN celebrates the life and work of Caithness artist and poet David Morrison

IT MAY be just 15 paintings, and it may be just the café as opposed to the gallery in Caithness Horizons, and it may just be on for the month of November, but there is something significant about this exhibition of recent work by David Morrison, the ubiquitous Caithness poet and painter.

One reason is that he is 70 this year. Another is that his painting is getting better and better. I cannot think of another Scottish artist – or any artist, for that matter – whose work arrests the viewer quite like Morrison’s.

Certainly there are shades of late Degas, influences of Matisse – there are dabs and splashes aplenty – but the main influence is Caithness itself, and in this capturing of the moods and open vistas of this fascinating, hypnotic landscape Morrison is unique.

David Morrison - landscape

The fifteen paintings on display in the café both lend themselves to and somehow frame the ever changing vastness of the sky, the parallel signature of the land and the peppery, all-revealing light of Caithness. If the county was a challenge, Morrison has met it.

In this exhibition there are abstract cloudscapes, controlled explosions of blue and green, gothic purple murmurings of dawn or dusk or a mythical representation of death, snow scapes with blood clots, images which form into ships or headlands and then seem to dissolve into something else, as if the artist is seeking some image and having found it, is disappointed and moves on for something better. David Morrison’s is a restless art. There maybe no human forms in this exhibition but there is great humanity.

“I am an abstract expressionist”, he told me when I met him in Wick, “and I believe that will never date. If it catches the eye it will last. I have always painted, self taught certainly, but I have looked and looked at paintings, how others have done it and what I can’t express in words I say visually.”

This business of saying is very important to Morrison and sheds light on his other talent – that of the poet. “When I was young I couldn’t speak – literally – I had such a terrible stutter. But in this regard, when I was in Edinburgh, I met such incredible poets such as Sydney Goodsir Smith, Norman MacCaig, Tom Scott, Hugh MacDiarmid, Iain Crichton Smith, Sorley Maclean, and of course Alan Bold, whose “Rocket” pamphlet I modelled “Scotia Review” on. As a magazine it was extremely influential, and I was very proud when the National Gallery of Scotland held an exhibition on the magazine in 1986. All these writers helped me find my voice.”

I ask him about of influence of Caithness on his work, which, to me, is such a strong theme. He says: “Caithness is my spiritual home. Edna [his wife] and I came here in 1965, to Thurso, to be principal assistant to the county librarian Fred Robertson. Of course Caithness influences me. I paint what I see, as does every artist. It was John L. Broom who took me here, in fact to Orkney, but it was when we were in Caithness I said to Edna ‘This is where I want to be’. I was at the time a very unhappy librarian at the Edinburgh College of Art.”

Colour, obviously, for an artist, is an issue, and that is one thing the exhibition in Caithness Horizons does not lack. “There is a great deal of spirituality in what I paint and why I paint, and here I don’t want to sound pretentious, but colour, the colours I choose, depends on my mood, on the weather. So this is Caithness, it will never leave me.”

It’s the relationship Caithness has to Morrison which is the question. The fact that his paintings are in the cafe and not in the Caithness Horizons gallery speaks volumes. This is not meant in detriment to the magnificent Joanne Kaar, whose work currently occupies that space, but in general there is not, and never has been, the recognition abroad that this committed artists work merits and deserves.

What I mean is that the general contribution David Morrison has made to the development of the arts in Caithness, and the Highlands in general, has been, somehow, forgotten. But Morrison’s vision has always been universal. It was no accident that the subtitle of his magazine Scotia Review was “for the Scottish muse and nation”.

David Morrison - landscape

This facility to make the local national and the national local saw such writers as the above mentioned Sorley Maclean, MacCaig, Crichton Smith, and many others over the years, visit Wick to read their work. This encouraged an entire generation of Caithness writers including myself, Colin MacDonald, Iain Bain, John Mcleod, Drew Macleod and others, writers who if it had not been for David Morrison’s energy would not have been exposed to outside stimulation and would not have had the careers they have subsequently fashioned.

On the flip side Morrison has always struggled with isolation – both geographical and intellectual. “Wick is a long way from Edinburgh”, he says, “So it was always difficult to keep the Wick festival of Poetry, Folk and Jazz going. But let me say this – I have no regrets whatsoever. I didn’t flinch when my house was re-possessed and when debts were run up, when no-one would give me any funding. My wife, Edna, has always stood by me and now I have two children and four grandchildren and there are many poets and painters who have stood by me too. I am a very loyal person.

“You see, everything comes in waves. There was a great resurgence – a new Scottish renaissance if you like – in the 1960’s with folk music and poetry in general and I was involved in it, in Edinburgh, with groups like The Heretics and others, so there was an audience there. Which is why, when I met up with John Humphries, the printer in Thurso, we produced a series of hugely popular books such as a collection of essays on Neil Gunn and a series on modern Scottish poets.

“But that was then, and you have to learn to hand things on. I take great inspiration from poets such as Willie Neal and George Mackay Brown, they took me on board and inspired me,  but you have to hand on to the next generation. But I’m also a great believer in the local audience and if a poet speaks directly to them, the people, they will be listened to.”

David Morrison - landscape

Morrison, as he speaks, pauses. I look out of the window and a glorious autumn sun is shining over the North Sea. Everything is crisp and defined. Suddenly I remember that this is the 1^st of November and as well as being the opening of his Caithness Horizons exhibition, it is also the Celtic festival of Samhain, the beginning of Winter, the day of the dead when the previous rise up and mingle with the current.

“I don’t fear death” he tells me, as if he has been sensing what I’ve been thinking. “I just want to be fit enough to die gracefully. That’s no bad, is it?”

It certainly isn’t, and apart from a bit of pulmonary problem – walking a distance brings on severe peching – he seems fit enough. “I’ve been writing hundreds of haikus,” he tells me. “I love the miniature. Which is why, I think, I like the work of artists such as Bet Low. Everything is concise.”

We walk, slowly, over from his flat to his favourite pub, The Mountain Dew, an old fisherman’s watering hole overlooking Wick harbour. It fits in with his philosophy – scrubbed, functional, minimal, dripping history and in its own particular way, very beautiful. When we enter bagpipe music, for some reason, belts out of the jukebox. We retire to the frosty exposure of the “smokers lounge”. No roof, lots of concrete. “What I’m attempting in my painting,” he tells me over a glass of red wine, “is to take the painters who have influenced me and give it a whole new Caithness dimension.”

I think of all the collages and colours, the landscapes and seascapes I have just seen on the Caithness Horizons walls, the shape-shifting lyricism of it and of the fields and sky I saw on the way to Wick – just the scale of it – so I ask him about that.

“I’ve produced over 2000 paintings so far. I believe in experimentation. Without experimentation you die as an artist. That’s the core of it.”

What Caithness, what Scotland owes this mercurial polymath is a decent retrospective in a proper gallery. David Morrison has given so much and asked for so little. “I’ve given up all my community work now and I’ve become meditative. I’ve really begun to appreciate Neil Gunn’s The Atom of Delight and all its Caithness-Zen wisdom. One thing I have learned, now that I am 70, that all life is, is love.”

In Morrison, art lives in Wick.

David Morrison, recent work, Caithness Horizons café, Thurso, until 30 November 2011; David Morrison’s work will also be included in Katnes Folio, an exhibition of art from Caithness, at the Axolotl Gallery, Edinburgh, 5-30 November 2011.

© George Gunn, 2011

Links

• Caithness Horizons