Robert Clarke Morris - Unlikely Scenes

UNLIKELY SCENES

Robert Clarke Morris was born in 1931 in New York City. He studied at Yale University with Josef Albers and Bernard Chaet, and received his B.F.A. in 1955. After military service at Fort Hood, Texas, he began teaching at the University of Houston in 1957, and then became the exhibit designer at the city's Museum of Fine Arts. In 1959 he became director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, organizing the exhibition "Out of the Ordinary", which introduced Texas to many contemporary artists of the broader art world. He developed friendships at this time with other artists and writers, such as Donald Barthelme and Ray Johnson, which continued through his life.

In 1960 he returned to the east coast, becoming associate Professor of Art at the University of Bridgeport, Connecticut, and later taught at Wesleyan University and, in the 1990s, at Trinity College. His style of painting evolved over this time to the combination of wry observation and imaginative flights of fancy that are shown in the works in these pages. Robert Clarke Morris died in 2019.

Please visit our website for a full list of exhibitions and other biographical information.

"Hangers On IV". Acrylic on board, 1974, 7 1/2 x 10 inches

"Many of Robert Morris's new paintings are engaged with the idea of photography...The occasions are, most often, the occasions of snapshots: a great deal of posing is going on. A sort of photographic realism prevails, not the Super-Realism which details the tiny organisms infesting our eye-lashes but an immediate likeness of human, animal, mechanical presences."

"Much of what we think we know we know from photographs. The camera is an honest man, we are told...Morris's notphotographs play against this notion in several ways. He manipulates a handful of images...into reliable, straight-forward untruths. Giving these paintings the same taken-for-granted credence we accord photographs."

"The degree of surrealist manipulation is very small: a few arrow holes. Morris seems to argue a reality already so surrealized that only the slightest underlining is necessary to make his point."

Donald Barthelme Washburn Gallery

catalog essay, 1976

"General Anesthetic". Acrylic on masonite, 1974, 8 x 10 inches

"Critics have commented about the images and tones and ideas of photography that are so evident in Robert Morris's paintings, and I hope it won't startle him if I suggest that he is also a writer's artist. It seems to me that his obsessions, his crowded and conflicting images and jokes and snapshots and juxtapositions, his illogical but precise blur of history and celebrity, machinery and nutriment, war and pets, anxiety and unobservance, represent the same concerns that preoccupy many contemporary novelists and short-story writers, who are doing their best (as we are all doing our best) with the daily clutter that assaults and exhausts our attention, with our fragmented imagination, and with our piercing, ungovernable memories."

Roger Angell

Washburn Gallery catalog essay, 1979

Untitled. Acrylic on board, 1974, 9 3/4 x 8 inches

"I've been involved with realism for the last 10 or 15 years and I think humor has always been there.

The paintings keep getting smaller and the forms keep getting more focused.

I try to leave my work open to varied interpretations...It's not meant to give you a well-defined story.

I work from photographs, photographs that I find...I hardly ever paint anything from imagination because your imagination just doesn't cut it the way the real object does."

from a newspaper interview, late 1970s

Untitled. Acrylic on board, 1974, 9 x 12 inches

"Pilots". Acrylic on masonite, 1978, 10 x 8 inches

"Backyard Target Practice". Acrylic on board, 1985, 7 1/2 x 10 inches

"Stone and Steel". Ink on paper, 2010, 17 x 14 inches

"Migration". Ink & pencil on paper, 2010, 11 x 27 inches

"Nexus". Ink on paper, 2012, 24 x 19 inches