Dialectic Exhibition – Lewes 2006           Sue Hubbard – Poet, novelist and art critic.                       

Background and Beginnings

Revolution - Paris - North America

Colette Morey de Morand was born in Paris in 1934. Her mother was Ukrainian and her father, John Louis Morey de Morand, a minor French nobleman with egalitarian leanings. Her mother’s family escaped to Paris following the Bolshevik invasion of Kyiv, in Paris they became part of the artistic and cultural milieu. Yet, even in this relative safe milieu, the family, particularly her grandfather, General Sikevitch, (as an influential White Russian) remained under threat from Bolshevik retaliation. After Colette’s birth, the family moved to North America.

Her formative years were spent in Canada, though her artistic sensibilities were influenced by the dramatic changes in Europe during the first half of the 20th century. The family was bohemian, culturally informed and believed in an intellectually aware. This straddling of two cultures and continents was to have an impact on her artistic expression for the rest of her life.

Although she’d always wanted to be an artist, following the premature death of her father, her mother convinced her to take a science degree, considering that it provided more secure prospects. Graduating from the University of Toronto with a degree in Pharmacognosy, Colette  Morey de Morand also studied art at Queen`s University, Kingston, Ontario.

1960`s

Environment-Metaphysics-Abstraction

After graduating, she married and moved to New Zealand. There, she continued her art studies at Massey University, Wellington under Paul Olds and Colin McCahon. In time, establishing a reputation as a metaphysical and environmental landscape painter and printmaker, her work sought to explore and catch the spirit of place. She exhibited widely, in countries such as Singapore and Japan and her work is held in public art collections in New Zealand, including Christchurch Art Gallery and the National Gallery, Wellington.

Although highly regarded there for her landscape works, her interest shifted towards abstraction. Whilst living in NZ she met Clement Greenburg, the high priest of Abstract

Expressionism. In addition, a friendship with the aging experimental abstract filmmaker and kinetic sculptor Len Lye further sparked her interest in abstraction. These encounters were to have a significant impact on her work.

In 1973, she was awarded a Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council Grant. This permitted her to travel internationally, to New York, London and Paris, where she met like-minded contemporary artists. These encounters led her to explore abstract painting further. A discipline she was to pursue for the rest of her career.

Architecture - Paris - New York

Whilst visiting Paris she met the Paris-New York architect Oscar Nitzchke. He had worked with Le Corbusier on the UN Building in New York and been a professor at Yale. He and Colette became close friends, and remained so until his death in 1990.

In their many walks around Paris, he encouraged her lifelong interest in the spatial dialogue between places and built environments (the figure ground) and ideas of connection, belonging and identity( Genius Loci). He had an extensive network of friends that included Leger, Miro, Duchamp, Mondrian and Calder, with whom she also became friends. Colette recalled; “We would wonder through Paris and I`d hear him talk about their lives and his take on them”. In 1991 she was co-curator for the ‘Oscar Nitzchke – Retrospective` Exhibition at the Cooper Union, New York.

1970`s

Ordering - Colour - Gesture

In 1974. she travelled overland through India and the Far East with her two young children, before arriving in London in 1975. London was to be her home for the rest of her life, though she continued to show in New Zealand, where her work was highly regarded.

She soon became part of the London contemporary art scene. Though she never completely embraced the prevailing fashion at that time for Minimalism and Conceptualism, preferring to eschew artistic dogmas in favour of individual creative expression.

During these early London years, she worked with loose grids, mapping the tension and interaction between painted and reflected light. She wrote: “Newly arrived I used the grid as a palimpsest of absences and the present to pump-up the energy and propel me forward” […] “using these resources to make abstract narrative paintings, conveying emotional experience through, ordering, colour and gesture

Arrival - Caulfield - Caro`s

During the 1970’s she lived and worked above the Ladbroke Grove studio of the painter and printmaker Patrick Caulfield, with whom she became close friends. She had met the sculptor Anthony Caro and his wife, the painter Sheila Girling, in New Zealand and in London renewed their acquaintance. This was to become a lifetime friendship. Their loosely lyrical approach to their own work (despite Caro’s use of heavy slabs of metal) created resonances within her own paintings.

As she moved further into abstraction, her working format became larger. Motivated by the metaphysical, it became more gestural. The emphasis was on spontaneous, personal and emotional expression, which she described as:

” A journey from the visual, though art, to the emotional and intellectual, revealing the forces/the truths that bind us to one another and to our environment”.

1980 ’ s

Berry Street Studio Community - Paula  Rego

In the early 1980`s Morey de Morand became a part of an informal collective of artists working at the Berry Street Studios in Clerkenwell. They would become a historically significant group. After her earlier studio isolation, she was moving in the company of other like-minded artists. It was here that she met the painter, Paula Rego.

While Morey de Morand`s work was abstract and ethereal, and Rego`s paintings narrative and corporeal – both shared an interest in art`s ability to access universal truths.  They became close, visiting exhibitions and openings, and providing each other with mutual support in the studio.

Both were painters at a time when to paint was out of fashion. It was also doubly hard for women, however good, to make headway in a world dominated by male artists.

Triangle - Artists Workshop 1983

In 1983 Morey de Morand was invited to participate in the Triangle Artists’ Workshop, in Pine Plains, New York, which had just been organised by Anthony Caro and Robert Loder,” to combat the loneliness of the studio”.

The painters, sculptors and critics taking part during this formative year included the painters, Larry Poons and Shiela Girling, the sculptors Anthony Caro and Tim Scott, along with critics Clement Greenburg and Karan Wilkin.

Morey de Morand was to say of the experience, “To work, laugh, talk share, to paint flat-out without limit; in excellent, invigorating and inspirational company; without distractions, except of the most excellent sort”.

The workshop had a profound impact on this group of pioneering international artists and was repeated annually until 1993.

Dance - Gestural Marking - Emotional Mapping

During the 80`s she exhibited widely both in London and abroad. For this she received grants from The Arts Council, British Council, the Elephant Trust and was awarded the Europe Prize for Painting-Oostende-Bronze Medal 1986.

Continuing to explore large scale, gestural, abstract painting, she displayed an exhilaration of pure abandonment; painting as a performance, of which she said, “Spontaneous, expression, being an event and secondarily an image, I invest myself physically and emotionally, as with a dance”.

In the 80`s painting as a synthesis of physical and psychic energy through gestural marking, had become increasingly analogous with dance and an interest in the body in motion. An interest that went beyond the traditional flesh and bone of life drawing and considered wider ideas of emotional mapping and personal and cultural expression, including links with performance art.

Land Painting - Orkney (Ultima Thule) – France (Bois Rateau)

Despite being studio based, her works were often inspired by the natural environment, where she pursued her own unique variety of painterly abstraction. These were not literal landscapes; they were developed from a heightened sense of the fragility of life and nature.  Nature was perceived as both immediate and transitory. She sought to express her relationship to the environment as a subjective, real-life experience, a lucid expression of the world. What the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard described as,” The sudden image, the flare-up of being in the imagination”.

Two series from this period are: Scotland - Orkneys-Ultima Thule - Todd Gallery, London 1988 and France – Bois Rateau 1986.

For each of these she developed a language she referred to as, Land Painting. The omission of the suffix- scape reveals the inspiration, not the genre of the picturesque, rather to share an alternative experience of, place, awe and otherness.

The Orkney, Land Paintings are without scale, and exclude the traditional picturesque middle ground. Developing instead a mystical and mediative connection between foreground (land) and the background, of heavens portal, the endless sky, of the timeless Ultima Thule.

Peter Walker, art critic, Independent on Sunday, wrote at that time;

“Yet she knows that by being in these places she has changed them. In these paintings the eye is drawn to the highest loneliest point, the skyline no one reaches” […] “These are not `landscapes` but paintings of the interaction between mind, emotions and unsentimental nature”.

1990’s

Matrices - Grids  - Geometric Abstraction

The bifurcation in the late 1940’s, of the traditions of abstract painting into expressionist (emotional) and geometric (intellectual) led to extreme positions. For Morey de Morand, a onetime expressionist, the split was unsatisfactory, even repressive.

The decade began with an exhibition at the Todd Gallery, London. of new studio works.

These retained the gestural interaction of her earlier expressionist paintings, but were overlaid by a loose matrix grid. This geometry was to appear in various forms throughout the 90’s.

A detached grid briefly appeared in earlier work (Courage 1976) that mapped the tension and interaction between painted and reflected light, the actual and the inferred.

Her use of a matrix or grid, applied or inferred, she referred to as “The dynamic flow between dipoles, anode and cathode on a multi-dimensional surface” […] Structure that controls the force, pumping up the energy or deflecting it”

Materiality - Entity - Infinite Space 

As the decade progressed the grid either diagonally or in the rectilinear cohered, expressing a tension between the flat surface of paint and, a build-up of the pigments, marble dust, and gels that often are applied so deeply that the works virtually turned into sculptures. Of which she said, “I enjoy, and wish to share the existence of the work as an entity, not an illusion”.

Using contrasts in contained areas between, smooth translucence and extremely thick pigments in others, the materiality of the works becomes unavoidable.

This is played off against the innate impulse to meaning by an imagined extension into the infinite space that extends beyond the edge.

Rituals - Symbols - Indian Series

In contrast to working in isolation in the studio, Morey de Morand used artists residencies to revivify her work. In early 1992 she did a residency, along with fellow American artist John Baldassari, at the Calico Museum and Sarabhi, Le Corbusier House, Ahmedabad, India.

With the support of local artisan assistants, each artist worked independently. Morey de Morand developed a series of abstract assemblages, incorporating the light and colours of India. These were created quickly outdoors with the help of local craftsmen. The result was a series of multi-layered tapestries of paint, layers of art and culture that incorporated abstracted representations of historic regional symbols, cultural objects and mythologies.

It was to be a unique cultural experiment that she later referred to as “Hybrid cross-cultural abstraction”.

2000`s

Imperial College - Love Affair - Mind Dance

In the new millennium, with its overarching post-modernist atmosphere Morey de Morand continued to champion the cause of abstract painting, her interest in exploring the possibilities of painting itself remained undiminished. In this sense she could be considered to have remained a modernist painter.

Throughout the 90`s she had explored geometric abstraction and evolved a more contemplative approach in contrast to the intuitive spontaneity of her earlier gestural works, an approach that she developed further in the new millennium.

A new series of paintings The Love Affair – Becomes a Mind Dance` were shown at the Imperial College Gallery – London 2001. The work was both precise and ambiguous, with its compositions of intense colour and detached forms, held within a matrix of translucent space.      The grid of the 90`s had largely disappeared, remaining only as a rectilinear memory in a fragmented visual colour field.

In an interview with:  Geoform - Publication - New York 2006, she explained:

`Mind Dance`, was a reference to working and looking more rationally, using intellect […] “pushing relationships and limits, experimenting; at first a love affair, then becomes a mind dance”.

An expression of the sheer joy of making paintings that celebrates being alive in a world full of infinite possibilities.

Lewes - Rhythm - Metaphor

Two significant new series of works emerged during the latter half of the 2000`s -The Lewes Suite - 2006 and the Berlin Studio – Series- 2008

The former were first shown as an independent exhibition at the` Lewes-Art Wave Festival-2006`, the exhibition was funded by the Arts Council.

In this new series she embarked upon an ambitious project that took the grammar of geometry and vocabulary of colour of her previous work, expanding it into new directions.

Constructed with gels, marble dust, and intense coloured acrylic pigments; a contrast between materials that link the abstract tradition of colour as form and others that delight in newness and experimentation.

The title, The Lewes Suite, - 2006 implied a musical relationship, with each work acting as a part of a whole, to capture a rhythm, pulse and tempo like that of a low heartbeat. Geometry was repeated and echoed, elements mirrored and contrasted to become metaphors for how we experience and remember.

The art critic Sue Hubbard wrote at the time;” They demand both of herself and the viewer an awareness to the world, for she is involved in an intense calibration between things seen, the experience of seeing and the translation of that experience into a painting in non-figurative language.”

Berlin  -  Genius Loci  -  Memory

“I have always responded overwhelmingly to location “[…]” place, shows in the work – the prevailing atmosphere, both past and present”- C. Morey de Morand - Geoform Interview

2005.

At the end of 2007 C. Morey de Morand took up a residency in Berlin, at the `Milchof Studios` in the former East Berlin, of all the cities in the world, Berlin is perhaps the one with the most to hide.

The effect was spelt out by dramatic changes in her work.  Formally considered order (modernist orthodoxy) was discarded. Faced with Berlin`s troubled memories of the Third Reich affection for ordnung , ( following orders ) an apparent  re-think of this fundamental question in art emerged within this work.

The `Gestalt` was about the fracturing of the parts. The marks became jagged, scattered, split up among sporadic fields of emptiness. Geometric forms were recognisable but didn’t behave as we expected. The idea of Berlin became a palimpsest, incorporating the permanent ‘now’ of its history.

This mood or, `Genius Loci` underlies the work made during this residency; it`s power is that the layering of history applies as much to C. Morey de Morand as a woman and as a painter. as it does to Berlin.

Vermont  -  Ireland  -  Galicia

The later years of the 2000`s were punctuated by a series of awards and international residences. Beginning with a 2007/8 shortlisting for the `British School – Rome`. C.Morey de Morand used these out of studio residencies to stimulate, broaden outlook and revivify her approach to her work.

They included: Vermont Studio Centre, USA -2009, Cill Rialaig, Ireland – 2009 and Ansoar Fornas, Award & Residency, Galicia, Spain – 2010.  An intentional mix of international locations including both urban and rural art communities.

2010`s   

Poussin  -  Rewired 2010

The new decade began with a mini-retrospective at the Poussin Gallery, Bermondsey, London.

A significant gallery at that time for abstraction, established in 2005 by Robin Greenwood, sculptor, painter, writer and important contributor to the discussion of abstraction.

The exhibition Rewired – 2010 took its title from studio works made by C. Morey de Morand after her return to London, from Berlin.

She was now into her fourth decade of a career in abstract painting that was something more than hypothesis or theory. There is in these mature works a coming together of strength, depth, intuition, expression of real feelings and events, paintings inseparable from the 21st century city.

Rewired – is a revealing title for these return to London paintings, and the core works have something of the feel of an implosion. A re-ordering, following some sort of emotional `Big Bang` and do coincide with a return to London now increasingly absent of her close old friends. The work titled `De Sidere` was dedicated to the film maker Paulia Sedgewick (cousin of the Warhol muse Edie Sedgewick) who had recently unexpectedly died.

In these works, the flatness of surface and considered abstract timelessness are a direct contrast to the heavy impasto she was using in earlier decades.

Many of the works draw the eye diagonally through a disordering of line, colour and space,

a self-contained experience with its own rules and universal qualities. By contrast in their very abstraction there is also a sense of 3D or architectural space and scale and the evocation of a

“Registration of absence” what is left by the presence of a person, the residue of absence.

2012 - ING Discerning Eye

In 2012 following an invitation from Charles Darwent- Art Critic Independent, Morey de Morand

presented a series of small works (40 x 40cm} at the ING Discerning Eye – Critic`s Choice, Exhibition, Mall Galleries, London.

This was a distinct change of scale of working format, of which she said,“I want people to lose themselves in my work, I love broad expanses of colour. Yet here I have found quite small paintings can also do this by focusing down.”

The works are an interesting confluence of earlier explorations and coalescing new ideas, the small working format giving a sense of intensive studies.   

Canvas Laboratory - De-focusing Down

Early in 2014 following a mini-stroke (TIA) Morey de Morand was forced to pause her otherwise

prodigious work output. Recovering from this medical event permitted time to reevaluate her approach to geometric abstraction. From this enforced period of retrospection emerged a series of small works.

The canvas again became her laboratory, redeveloping an interest in the working space as a tangible destabilised fluid surface, where; “Perceptions are ambushed and altered. Moving the work from a closed world to an infinite world, with a corresponding form that is kaleidoscopic in nature”.

The approach to these small scale works she referred to as, `De-focusing Down’, the pulverisation of the focal point with equality by reflection. Two small works in the series, Alchemy and Quicksilver, introduce an abstract adaptation of the western tradition of,

mise-en-abyme, to effect these aims.

2020`s - Last Works - Becoming, Not Being

Over six plus decades of abstract painting Morey de Morand always sort the metaphysical in her work, there exists a clear evolution through her career. From the early expressionist explorations of the materiality of paint and the exhilaration and abandonment of the gestural works - painting as a performance, body and canvas uniting in a synthesis of physical and psychic energy - on to her later cerebral interests in Geometric Abstraction.

She continuously displayed an independent and vivacious spirit in pursuit of a personal exploration and development. Saying; “My work is my life, my own world where I belong”.

She skilfully mastered and embraced a diversity of styles, processes and subjects, often avoiding a fashionable or formulaic approach.

In explanation she explained how Kandinsky used the term `resonance` to designate what is spiritual in art and cautioned against developmental statis. Who went on to say;” Formulas are like glue, to which the careless fall prey. A formula is also a leather arm-chair, which holds the occupant firmly in its warm embrace”.

In this context she had begun a new series of works she titled `Becoming, Not Being` inspired by an earlier unexplored interest in the French philosopher `Gilles Deleuze` and his metaphysical propositions in the `inherent or immanent`.

Becoming, Not Being, turned out to be a prophetic title, as the series was cut short all too soon, by her sudden and untimely death from the COVID virus.