Guy Morgan

02 February - 07 March      The Scorpion's Claw Nebula 

Link to artist's website

Guy Morgan’s painting fits the spectre of the universe into SLOT! This ghost of light is the Scorpion’s Claw Nebula, a large constellation near the center of the Milky Way between Libra and Sagittarus, reminding us that this incomprehensible large astronomic fact fits into our mythology of the zodiac.

At the age of 7 Guy Morgan “discovered he was good at art”. By 18 he was enrolled in one of the world's great art schools, London’s St. Martins School of Art where he gave up painting for graphic art. At 25 he was on a plane heading for Australia when he decided to go into advertising.  After 35 years in the Oz-ad-biz and with worn out eyes he started painting with an eyedropper!

Another version is that at St. Martins School of Art Guy became dissatisfied with the direct connection between his hand and the marks he made. After travelling to Australia he enrolled in the Master of Arts program at the Sydney College of the Arts where he began painting with an eyedropper as a way of distancing himself from mark making– then an image of space evolved. 

Like the nebula and Guy’s biography, his painting invites two readings. One as a pretty good illustration of space that carries all the culturally imbedded information we have about the unknowable space it represents.  The second as a spectre of abstract art. A ghost of High Modernism, Jackson Pollock is a well-known example of artists who distanced themselves from the mark making process. Pollock dribbled and flicked paint from his brush; Morgan used an eyedropper, in both cases inviting gravity into the mark making process with the effect of encouraging the paint to behave as paint.  This paint that represents nothing more than itself sits on a surface that is flat. There is no spatial consideration– a fact that Guy observes in a traditionally modernist manner with a narrow line top and bottom, not a pictorial device but a consequence of the selvedge of the canvas. He reminds us again that canvas is a surface, paint is paint and art is fact, as space itself is fact, both known and unknown.

To offer a pun, Guy's painting is indeed nebulous. He switches effortlessly between the opposed belief systems that govern both his subject and the practice of painting.

-Tony Twigg