Peter Morrell

There are two letters from Peter Morrell to Ruth Borchard, both dated 1964, from Belsize Park, London NW3. In the first, he says he will search among his pictures, as 'I know I have one or two self-portraits [...] I am interested in your idea of a rogues gallery of painters and would like to support it by sending you something.' In his second, he writes: 'I have the portrait I was looking for and thought that I would bring it to Reigate on Monday 13^th […]'

Writing to the author in 2001, Peter Morrell said: 'Thank you for your photograph of the small portrait of myself. It is strange to see it again as it is something I had completely forgotten.' Dated 1957, it shows the artist aged about twenty-six (he was born in Newton Abbot, Devon in 1931), a perspectivally diminutive and fragile-looking young man within the confines of what appears to be a huge, empty barn or warehouse structure. He writes that 'I do remember that I painted it in my Battersea studio at the Latchmere, Battersea Bridge Road. This was an ex-hayloft, part of a cobbled stable yard, then used as a taxi lock-up garage [...] I had that place when I was at the Royal College of Art and most of my best work was done there [...] This 13 x 33 foot space was 25 shillings a week including electricity. The picture makes me look very vulnerable.'

He had studied at Kingston School of Art from 1952-56, and then at the Royal College of Art, London from 1956-59, where his teachers had included John Minton, Roger de Grey (q.v.), Ruskin Spear and Carel Weight (q.v.). He was awarded various prizes and, after graduating from the R.C.A., spent an extended period in Rome (having won the Prix de Rome painting prize).

There are some affinities between Morrell's bleakly coloured self-portrait and Alberto Giacometti's near-contemporaneous sketchy oil paintings of grey, haunted people existentially stranded against abysmally dark backgrounds (and also with the latter's attenuated figurative sculptures). In the 1950s and 60s, works by Giacometti could be seen quite often in London galleries. The painter Frank Auerbach has said that in the 50s: 'an artist like Giacometti offered hope, to continue to give everything for a truthful art without any compromises'.

Morrell's posture here is tentative and awkward, his slim shoulders oppressed by the weight of the huge, empty space around him. His boyish face, with its shock of thick, dark hair and huge, emphatic eyes, looks lost and rather gaunt. The grid of rafters and beams above appears hard-edged and impersonal – though warmed by yellow light (in contrast to the silvery half-light on and around the figure itself). Yet there is a certain hard-won dignity, a gloomy grace, in the artist's central, full-frontal pose.

In 2001, Morrell looked back on his style and influences at the time: 'I had my first show of [large and rather minimal colour-field] paintings at the New Art Centre, Sloane Street during 1964. I had been working in a more abstract impressionist way prior to this [though] abstract impressionism is not quite the right tag to put to the previous work as there was more of a landscape connection, and Cornish painters between 1950-62 had a lot of influence on me – Hilton, Blow, Lanyon, Nicholson, as did Tàpies, Burri and others. I had met Hilton and knew Sandra Blow quite well during my final years at the Royal College. I spent time in Cornwall with both artists.'

An early oil painting, Hammersmith - The Mall (1954), showing the river and a small gang-plank bridge to a boat, riverside houses and a wall, reveals the meticulous attention to structure and the kind of rigorously restricted palette that has surfaced in his highly diverse paintings of all periods.

Writing to the author in 2001, he recalls that:

          [...] at the R.C.A. and previously at Kingston [...] we had an education that was really the tail end of the Victorian tradition; drawing was paramount, particularly at Kingston [...] The R.C.A. expected more during the final two years, and staff conscientiousness was harder to find [...] It was good to have tutors like Carel Weight (q.v.), Ruskin Spear, Roger de Grey (q.v.) etc. though I cannot say I learnt a great deal from them. They provided an ambience but I honour them as artists in their own right. I did have one or two running battles with Carel Weight (Uncle Bumble, we called him) but I respected him highly as an artist. Being instructed by Ruskin Spear and Roger de Grey was like a session with Morecombe and Wise, a hoot but often at the students' expense.

I remember most of the staff with affection and to one or two I owe a lot. Two men in particular, Rodney Burn and Colin Hayes. Ceri Richards was a good and sympathetic tutor, and William Scott on the occasion of tutorials. A special person to us all was John Minton who I supposed we loved anyway. Not only did he seem to be what we aspired to but he was a talented teacher. His group criticisms were special performances for which the entire painting school would be present, and not to be missed was a Minton criticism of the sketch club or the summer composition exhibition. I can feel it as I write this, his enthusiasm, his infectious fullness of life. He used to give us one-to-one painting tutorials too, I have not known anyone who could more or less take the work to bits, shred it almost, yet leave one with the feeling that it was a privilege to paint and that it was all worthwhile.

  I often went to local pubs during my last two years at the R.C.A., and it was in The Queen's Elm and Finches in the Fulham Road that I met most of the artists at this time. Regulars including Armitage, Frost, Hilton, Blow, etc. etc.

 I worked part-time for Mrs Lessore at the Beaux Arts Gallery, Bruton Place during 1961 to 1963 as gallery technician and odd bod, framing and what not. This put me in touch with many of the artists of that period, and I even exhibited there. A very fine woman was Helen Lessore and good judge of quality painting.

He says that 'it is hard to say how many portraits I've done, perhaps a dozen or so, mostly at Kingston or the R.C.A. This one [the 1957 self-portrait] is the last, which is not to say I will not do another one day.' However, there is a rare surviving portrait (made in 1958 at the Royal College), with a muddy, Sickertian palette, which depicts an old man in grim repose, perhaps asleep: it shows the young artist's uncanny empathy with qualities of dignity and vulnerability in old age.

Morrell's ambitious 1960s colour-field paintings are shot through with optical and spatial conundrums (as seen in his delicate, mesmerising 1964 painting Spot (Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre), purchased in that year from the New Art Centre, London – in which a cosmic orb – or sun – is shown to be made up of a honeycomb-like structure made up of oscillating forms of subtle orange and yellow hues, resembling pears, light bulbs and sometimes UFOs! He now relates these works not to 'Pop Art (never an interest of mine), Americana and advertising' but to his own interests in 'landscape, the arcane, grid structures, Celtic myth and, overall, colour and texture [...] For me, painting is a form of enquiry about painting itself, the paradoxes, the metaphors, subjective-objective relationships and the puzzles of perception.'

His development since his student days has 'dodged about a bit, not a steady line at all. After my 1964 show, my work became more and more hard-edged and formal.' Problems in his private life 'rather took over' in the late 60s and he gave up painting altogether for about four years, though he continued teaching at Hornsey College of Art. He soon decided that 'abstract painting was a wrong heading for me, not enough for me', and he took up watercolour landscape painting – a 1977 black wash sketch of Dartmoor presents a characteristic ominous beauty. More recent still life paintings of tabletops –  with bottles, plates, jugs, and often incorporating blackened bananas – are distinguished by their informal grid-like design, sombre palette (with scumbled, greyish-white backgrounds not unlike that seen in his early self-portrait) and eery poetry.

- Text by Philip Vann, updated and revised from the first edition of Face to Face: British Self-Portraits in the Twentieth Century, 2004