A SERIES of poetic paintings from one of the region’s most interesting artists will feature in a new exhibition in Rugby.
Like a Song with No End, the latest exhibition by Birmingham-based painter Shaun Morris, comes to Rugby Art Gallery and Museum’s Floor One Gallery next week.
His dramatic and atmospheric nocturnal landscapes of the Black Country and overlooked corners of the Midlands have been exhibited widely across the region in the last decade, including at New Art Gallery Walsall, T Street Gallery, Ikon Gallery, the Herbert Art Gallery and Nuneaton Museum and Art Gallery.
Thomas of Gloucester by Shaun Morris.
The new exhibition also includes his first portraits in many years, also set at night, depicting a delivery driver, a social worker on call, and an artist at work to reveal the psychological relationships the subjects have with the spaces where they spend much of their time.
Solitary figures also feature in other paintings set in the landscape – walking in the woods in winter, on a barge along the canal in autumn, or zipping along the towpath on an e-scooter amid the spring hawthorn.
Shaun, who was recently a contestant on Sky Arts’ Landscape Artist of the Year, said: “These paintings contain my thoughts about three generations of men in my own family, including myself, and their personal journeys.
“Despite the immediacy of my subject matter, its themes are far-reaching. These landscape paintings hold for me experiences of aimlessness, uncertainty, belonging and solitude.
“The solitary figures in my work are journeying through life, with destination unknown, and feelings of being off-centre or out of place prevail beneath the scenes depicted.”
The exhibition also includes the display ‘Fallen Leaves’, in which small paintings and etchings are presented as fragments of the larger paintings, expanding their story in imaginative ways.
On another wall, ‘Five Paintings of Snow’ presents a selection of recent landscapes that reference influences including the post-abstract representational paintings of American artists like Fairfield Porter or Lois Dodd, the dynamic abstract brushwork of Franz Kline, the creative use of colour of the Fauvist ‘wild beasts’, and the pared down economy of Chinese brush paintings.
Shaun added: “Much like life itself, the paintings evolve naturally from one thing to the next, like a song with no end. This exhibition celebrates the repetition and beauty of the song we are in, as artists and as human beings.”
The exhibition takes place at Rugby Art Gallery and Museum from June 4 to 15, with a private view on Saturday June 8 from 1pm until 3.30pm.
