John Lowrie Morrison - The point of views

There is a view of the moon rising over Mull, intense and yellow over a dark, cobalt sea; sheep grazing among rocks on a beach at twilight become an abstract pattern of colour; a sunset is reduced to horizontal planes of colour with an almost Rothko-esque minimalism. Jolomo’s new work for a major show next month at Kranenberg Fine Art in Oban is both darker and more colourful than ever.

Morrison is one of Scotland’s most successful and prolific artists, with a reputed turnover of 2 million a year. Fans include Madonna, Sting, Rick Stein and Chris Patten. Commercial galleries can’t get enough of him. Critics are sanguine. Mostly, he just keeps his head down his studio in Tayvallich, Argyll, and paints, paints, paints.

But two years ago, Jolomo raised his head above the parapet and launched an art prize. The Jolomo Awards for Scottish Landscape Painting, with total prize money of 30,000, aimed at encouraging landscape painting among young and emerging artists, immediately became the biggest privately funded art prize in Scotland, and one of the biggest in the UK.

The response surprised all of us (I was on the judging panel) with more than 80 entries and a strong shortlist of nine, painting in styles that ranged from photorealism to abstract expressionism. The winner of the 20,000 first prize, Anna King, a recent graduate of Duncan of Jordanstone School of Art, is a painter of quarries and wastelands, an original, modern voice in landscape art.

The 2009 awards were launched yesterday at the National Galleries of Scotland. Morrison believes that already there are signs that more young people are engaging with landscape. “You can’t say, ‘This has changed Scottish art,’ and in a way that’s not what I’m wanting to do, I just want to progress painting, and landscape painting in particular, which is not far from its death throes.

“Most of the current landscape painters are getting older. I’m 60 this year. In the next 20 years, who’s going to take up the baton, or the brush? Conceptual art has taken over, it’s as if conceptual art is cool, other art is not. For me, painting is the most important thing, and I would hate it to disappear. And it could do.”

Equally, the prize is not a reactionary attempt to reinstate painting at the expense of conceptual art – Morrison admires the work of many contemporary artists. “It’s not the anti-Turner Prize. It’s a contrast but it’s also trying to push art on. When I was an art teacher I always felt I wanted everybody to do what their vision was. If that was from a conceptual point of view, or textiles or glass or sculpture, that’s fine.

“The prize is about moving landscape painting forward. If you’re hoping to move painting on, you’re looking for people who have got a wee bit of personal vision. You don’t want someone who has a good formula and is just doing the same thing all the time.”

Which is interesting, because this is exactly what Jolomo himself is sometimes accused of, producing picture after picture of yellow fields, red roofs and blue sky. Certainly, our conversation in the studio is punctuated by sounds of John’s wife Maureen and studio assistant Linda framing work from earlier in the week, frames being delivered, paintings being collected. Given that he can produce four canvases a day, 100 a month, there is a feel of a cottage industry, if not a production line.

I’ve known Jolomo for several years, and sometimes I think the man can’t win. His detractors snipe that he’s churning out crowd-pleasers, but he is copied as much as he is criticised. When he tried to shake off the plagiarists by painting only lighthouses and castles, they simply followed suit.

When he talks about his current series of paintings about Mull, it is clear that there is more to them than an act of decorative representation. He speaks in expressionist terms about an emotional response to the landscape, and in terms of research into geography, folklore, geology, the human resonances of a place, all of which inform the work.

Morrison grew up in Glasgow and studied at Glasgow School of Art. By the time he was in secondary school, he had a studio in his parents’ flat. While at art school he won a scholarship from the Royal Academy Schools and travelled to Europe where he discovered the work of Chagall, Soutine and Kokoschka, and came back painting in Technicolor.

He worked in education for 30 years before quitting in 1997 to paint full time, but he was always prolific, even at art school. He works fast, but so do many expressionist painters. The physical application of paint to canvas is so integral to his life, he gets “quite ratty” when not painting. When, partly at the instigation of his family to rest more, he took a house on Mull, he promptly had a studio installed and began painting a big series of works about the island.

No-one is more worried about his work becoming formulaic than he is. “If I wanted to do the same painting over and over again, people would just buy it. You’ve got to be very careful that you do not get into a rut of doing a formula. That concerns me greatly with my own work and with other people’s.

“I always want to move on and try different things. There are still things I want to develop and part of that is down the semi-abstract route. I’m going back to ideas I had at art school. They didn’t work then, but now I find I know how to do them.

“The other side of it is that I do love architecture and I do love crofts. I don’t know whether it’s because my roots are on a croft in Harris, I’ve just always loved a white gable end and a red corrugatd iron roof. It does worry me that you get into a formula but that’s not the way I’m doing it, it’s a striving to find something in it each time.”

He shows me a painting of a twisted old oak tree and says it took him 20 minutes. Then he stops, remembering something he was told 40 years ago by the artist David Donaldson, his teacher at GSA. “He said, ‘When people ask you how long it took to do a painting, don’t say ten minutes, say 40 years.’ That’s how long the learning process takes.”

For more information and application forms for the Jolomo Awards 2009 see www.jolomofoundation.org

WHAT LANDSCAPE MEANS TO ME

“WHEN we moved to Boston in 1980 I didn’t know if we’d settle there permanently or come back to Scotland, but my heart soon settled the matter, and the landscape of Scotland had almost everything to do with it. I have always been a hill walker and longed for the bare hills of Scotland, where you can turn round and look back and see where you’ve come from. I still tramp the hills because I like to be quiet and let my mind roam. Problems have been solved on the hills, speeches plotted, even the odd sermon. More importantly, the hills root me and console me. Ground covered by your own feet, in all weathers and at all seasons, is your own ground, owned by you in the only way anything can be owned: in the heart.”

RICHARD HOLLOWAY, CHAIRMAN OF THE SCOTTISH ARTS COUNCIL

“IN A general sense, landscape means long-sightedness, and an understanding of ourselves in a context. Personally, for me, the Highland landscape – especially because I live elsewhere now and miss it – can make me sit up on a train like an excited dog would with his head out of the window of a car, getting a noseful of home just by breathing.”

ALI SMITH, WRITER

“SCOTLAND is famed worldwide for its stunning scenery. No matter where in the country people go they are met by incredible landscapes and idyllic views. One of my favourite settings is Perthshire – year round there is always something to make you stop and take in the fantastic scenery, particularly at this time of year.

Never has there been a better time for the people of Scotland to get out and see what the country has to offer, especially as we build towards the year of Homecoming.”

PHILIP RIDDLE, CHIEF EXECUTIVE VISITSCOTLAND

“MY WORK with landscape is about making the rock rockier, the green greener, to sense what is under your feet or arching above you, to find your place in the world. The impossible desire to really see and feel what is around you, to have a better sense of living through your experience of the natural world, no matter how modified and redirected by the complexities of human intervention over the millennia.”

ANGUS FARQUHAR, CREATIVE DIRECTOR, NVA